Entry tags:
ECH0 Postmortem
ECH0 is a short storytelling TTRPG by Role Over Play Dead originally created for the 2019 Emotional Mecha Jam - and now I've played it! It's melancholy, bittersweet, encourages gesture- and detail-based worldbuilding on the fly, and is ultimately all about getting invested in the particulars of a story with an already-fated ending: all things I love in a story and in a game.
We ended up playing out a sad, lonely set of vignettes about a dead soldier who comes face to face with some harsh things about death, war, and fragile existence through her brief connection to a living child—and a living child who learns something about the past, and also about the value of his own one human life. The story spanned just a few nights in-game, and about six hours of play out of it: taking Carlo and the Gorgon/Alice between a construction site, a gorge and underground stream, and a city choked with barbed wire and civil unrest.
The system premise: In ECH0, the players take the roles of what amounts to a technological ghost—an ECH0 drive of the memory and consciousness of a dead mecha pilot from a past war—and the children that discover it and go on a little quest to look for the ruins of mecha and return the pilot ECH0 to their mech.
In our case, there were just two of us, so this ended up being a two-character game. The game also contains basic tables to roll on for prompts: you decide some basic things about the setting, draw a map as you go, and find out about the ruins you discover.
The players: I played this in two sessions with my partner,![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
gogollescent, as we were looking for a good remote activity to do together and had collectively amassed an archive of storygame pdfs from itch.io and the like and she had a copy of ECH0. We both like RP and TTRPGs in particular and are already in a four-person game together (Blades in the Dark) (that is certainly still going) (I GM this) (my god is it still going, and no regrets! ♥)
[2022 ETA: you can now check out her writeup of ECH0 and another game we played, Debrief!]
We're also both fans of the Friends at the Table actual play podcast season Counter/Weight, which is mecha-themed - I also have some very dim nostalgia of mecha anime, primarily Gundam, from the early 2000s, but my memory dwindles. Since we also both dig depressing and elegiac, and the potential of child narrators for scope limitations on tragic and epic stories, this interested us both.
Relevant storygame comparisons: I actually cannot remember most of the storygames I've played, since most underwhelmed me in execution compared to concept - which I say without rancor, as most are also tossed together on a lark, which is a good and noble thing to do with one's time.
That being said, I do really like the game Lovecraftesque and in a lot of ways the ECH0 experience pleasantly reminded me of it but in a more low-key and structured way, with more potential for 'zooming' in and out, abstracting, and playing and narrating just as much as we thought fitting.
Platform: We played over voice and video through Roll20.net, where we used the dice roller a couple of times andgogollescent drew an increasingly lovely sketched-out map of the environs.
Time: Two sittings, about 6 hours total.
Story premise: We rolled a die to figure out who was going to be the pilot's ECH0 drive and who the child. I ended up playing the child andgogollescent the dead pilot ECH0 and started our worldbuilding from there: we decided the war was very recent, just ending around the time of the birth of my character (who was about 11 years old), and that the game took place on a defeated and conquered planet.
My character, Carlo, was the son of occupying settlers: two defense contractors come to work on a base developing an arid, rural region of the new colonial holding. He was eleven, unfamiliar with much of the history of his world and knowing very little outside his lonely dusty existence and his military base school for settlers' kids - but with a fervent childish passion for mechs and mecha pilots of the past war, as though they were Pokemon or baseball cards.
Though he lacked much context for the significance, he could always recite specs and tales of daring deeds and honorable rivalries and glamorous aces. He dreamed of one day becoming a pilot himself, maybe not entirely disconnected from his increasing struggles and falling behind in school and feeling of confusion and alienation from his family and environment.
gogollescent's character, who went by the callsign the Gorgon, was a downed mecha ace pilot from the previous anti-imperial war. gogollescent can expand more on her character herself, but in short the Gorgon's experience of war was a grim conflict of attrition, and of being the last holdout against an increasingly overpowering conquering force - where guerrilla deeds, morale, strength of will, and skills can only go so far against the seemingly endless resources of the other side throwing all they've got at you. (It was fun to come up with these concepts at the same time, with Carlo admiring a very romanticized version of this: which I gather was sort of cute to the Gorgon and sort of a sign of the ultimate humiliation in defeat, which is when the enemy's children admire a tragic, neutered version of your story.) Her background alluded to a fraught relationship with just a couple of other pilots she was forced to stick by in her unit, until it was just her.
An interesting, lightly touched on part of the Gorgon's backstory was that she was actually from the outer (mining asteroid) colonies of this rebellious homeworld: so not even really at-home in the vanquished romantic world.
Her name turned out at the very end of the story to be Alice, although I don't know whengogollescent came up with this, actually! One fun element of this game and both our RP style was that we hardly discussed it all OOC until afterward, so we were both uncovering a mystery at the same time we were improvising it.
The world:gogollescent drew a very nice oekaki-type mouse drawing map in Roll20. It was a simple setup, with Carlo's small base hometown including his school and the construction site where he'd trespass and initially found Alice's ECH0 drive, and direction arrows noting where the wilderness unfolds from there.
I had a vague image of this area as being very arid with a river and river gorges, sort of like [[pictures I've seen of, I am American]] parts of Northern Territory, Australia. Not reflective of the planet—we didn't go much into the scope of the planet in this game, much less the galaxy or whatnot—but at least the area where Carlo's family resided and worked. There was also a city about an hour away by bus, which Carlo mentioned as being a destination for field trips and also (casually) full of troops and barbed wire and segregated sections due to "political problems" and "terrorism," with all the blase-ness of a kid who knew no other political situation.
The story [according to Carlo]: The game ECH0 is meant to unfold over a starting situation and then a series of a couple of journeys where the children find wreckage of mechs (with prompts from a table in the PDF) leading to a final journey where they find the ECH0 pilot's mech and lay them to rest. Since Carlo was only one kid, we decided on three journeys: two "regular" and one final.
That was interesting, because it meant figuring out who the pilots were for the first two wrecks, which largely fell togogollescent and Alice: the way ECH0 is set up, the kid(s) are largely determining the physical landscape of the "now" (what they see, what is left) and the pilot is largely determining the story of the "then" (what this really signifies, what secret histories or forgotten memories actually led up to this), which is a really fun RP division.
I've been finding that I have the most fun with storygames when they have clear and yet really expansive boundaries around the roles or domains of the RPers: like the "GM" switchoff in Lovecraftesque. I find it's really easy for both people to get shy and too-hesitant when the boundaries are ill-defined: RPers (especially the personalities attracted to storygames, in my experience) are afraid of stepping on each other's toes, and the fewer demarcated roles, the more the fear of toe-stepping increases. I thought ECH0 had a good balance here.
Carlo first found Alice (then just known to him as "Gorgon") in ECH0 drive form in a derelict, frequently-redeveloped development hell construction site near his school. He was immediately both enchanted by and skeptical of her story—why would a heroic fallen rebel mecha ace bother to talk to a little kid?
But soon the apparent answer sufficed: she didn't have much of a choice in the matter. After all, she was an ECH0 drive: something between a ghost and a simulation. He was a little interested in the ontology of this and sometimes guardedly asked after what she was experiencing and feeling, but not more than he was interested in the story—and in very dangerous trespassing.
Thus commenced several concerning adventures, as far as child safety was concerned. First up was wreck one: according to the randomized table, Just a head and upper torso, the rest underground. A tunnel leads down into the hollowed-out wreck - someone's home? (I loved this visual immediately: the gargantuan ruin reminded me of Order from Counter/Weight as well as some stuff from Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind and Attack on Titan.)
It ended up being an eerie submerged, toxic-chemical-leaching, stripped-by-salvagers wreck buried both in water and in silt. There was an interesting interplay where Alice deduced this was an enemy (to her) mech taken down by her own team - one recurring theme was Carlo's observantness about his interest in mechs limited by his childlike and action-figure-ish exposure to them, vs Alice's actual experience - and an awkward back-and-forth where it sank into him, in the silence between lines, that a person actually died here, and was entombed in this.
This counted the first mention of some dead, historical comrades of Alice's whose story would unfold more as we played on—first mentioned as doomed rebellion heroes/antiheroes mythologized even by their enemies, especially one with the callsign Perseus (who accordingly had a rumored lover with the callsign Andromeda). Carlo had a bit of a hero-worship fascination with Perseus—sort of a Hector of Troy to him—who he'd heard had risen to heroic fame as a pilot even despite his dyslexia and dyscalculia that would have normally disqualified him—obviously Carlo, a kid struggling himself with some form of learning disability, saw a lot that was hopeful in this story.
To Alice, this was a reminder of something else: her cause's desperation, the chaos that made it possible for someone who'd otherwise be disqualified like Perseus to make it through the ranks and find accommodation of sorts, as long as that accommodation was used to fight. After all, they couldn't afford to be choosy. She knew this story well because Perseus was, in fact, her squadron mentor and leader. She was also familiar with the technology he leaned on as an accommodation.
At this same time, it also clearly occurred to her that she was going around with a kid into hazardous situations—although he didn't lack for wariness of the water, she was also concerned with the salvagers the wreck might attract. And so they continued on, and the issue of Alice's mortality uneasily rose higher in Carlo's mind.
The second wreck was rolled as Bolt upright on its feet. Displayed in a public square, outside a museum, or perhaps a military academy? I love fictional statues, memorials, and propaganda, and was immediately interested—however, it was clear this tableau wouldn't fit into Carlo's rural cattle station/military base hometown. So off on a city field trip he went, ECH0 drive in his pocket!
(There was a lot of cute awkward comic interaction here, including Alice admitting to him that she could hear 'a lot of pocket' when they were going around and Carlo immediately figuring out how to clip the ECH0 drive to his backpack with a lanyard clip.)
War statues are interesting and imply a sanitized, after-the-fact narrative. I was thinking about a displayed mech like something between a war hero's statue and a giant WWI Cenotaph. Carlo's class ended up passing through a massive security barrier onto a giant museum/historical site compound, where he sat at the feet of this big mech, among a lot of pigeons while his class took a lunch break. He explained what he did know about the mech: it was a famous "hero mech" called Hospitaller, which was piloted by a series of war heroes, most famously at the end by a doomed nineteen-year-old ace named Ramirez.
Here Carlo had the chance to observe some oddities about the Hospitaller mech—some elements of it that didn't match up with the story, including how it clearly couldn't be piloted alone.
The way Carlo knew this story, Ramirez was felled by Perseus. What Alice told him was very different from this government narrative—Ramirez had not been killed heroically in battle by Perseus, but had come to defect to Alice's side, and indeed he did. He went as far as to murder his copilot and gunner, Jordan Kim, in the effort. Ramirez was terminally ill and had originally joined up to make something of his final days as a young man, only to find what he was actually doing was making them terrifying as well as short—but he'd heard that the technology Perseus used to interact with real time had a time-dilating effect, could make life seem longer for him. He wanted that.
(Carlo was crestfallen and fascinated—crestfallen that a famous young hero in fact wanted to live more than he wanted to not betray his friend; and fascinated by the story all the same. It was also becoming clear, narratively, that Alice was starting to think better of glamorizing and glorifying the war to a child like Carlo, and was swallowing the bitter pill of being blunt with him instead.)
They had an exchange where he first claimed—with cynical feigned middle school cool—that if he were Ramirez, he'd do something else with his time, like maybe learn to cook. Alice praised his wisdom, which possibly was his motivation to go back on it: and more candidly admit, minutes later as a non sequitur, that wasn't true—he would've done it too. He would've done it in a heartbeat.
(It was on this grim note that we rolled on the table one more time, assuming that Carlo and Alice would return from Carlo's field trip and then go on a final journey to find Alice's mech. But we rolled: Someone built a house around this mech. The torso acts as a load-bearing pillar. An amazing living room display. A very surreal, interesting, morbid image—and also not very at-home in the cattle station military base. So we backtracked a little and kept the scene on Carlo's field trip for the finale.)
There were protesters mentioned—by Carlo, too naive and detached to know what about exactly or how seriously—in the original field trip. For this new scene, the escalating protest forced the field trip to stay put in a lockdown at the museum compound as the situation was deemed too unsafe for bus travel. Carlo, curious and restless, snuck out under the fence—not entirely unaware of Alice's probable opinion of this choice, as he only told her this after he did so—and wanted to take a closer look at things.
What he found, terribly and inevitably, was a protest surrounding Alice's mech: something that had been uncovered and turned into a garish art display, which protesters wanted to see returned to the hands of locals and respected, with a chant of bring her home! Or at least that was the probable implication: one of the most interesting recurring things about the premise of ECH0 is, since it was confined (as we played it) to Carlo's narration and Alice's responses, we'd never really know for sure. But she recognized the description of the paint.
At this point, seeing sights and telling the truth of history was no longer meaningful to Alice. She had let a young kid get into a very dangerous, violent situation and though she couldn't do anything for herself any more, she could do something for him, at least, a little. It was a fascinating and painful finale where her careful control—as the battery keeping her "alive" was failing—was all focused on getting him out (instructing him on a cloth mask for tear gas, telling him it didn't matter what happened to her mech) without frightening him. He was old enough to realize this, to some extent, but still obeyed.
I found the most painful and poignant element of this to be my uncertainty as to whether Alice was telling the truth to Carlo on one last particular thing, one of his last questions to her ever: whether her body was entombed with her mech at the site of conflict. She said straight out that she was sure she'd ejected, and must have died near where he found her ECH0 drive, clearly. The thing is this could very well be true, in the logic of the story—I just knew (and probably Carlo will know, for the rest of his life, as he gets older) that it's what she would say anyway to him, if that was what it took to get him to run.
It was during this last conversation that he asked her for her real name, but it colored the rest of the story in hindsight (as did many other things) so I have a hard time thinking of her by something else.
Thoughts on playing Carlo: Playing and writing kids is interesting. I think a lot of fictional kids' portrayals suffer from being kind of the genre vehicles of adults' wistfulnesss about childhood, or at least what about the fantasy world of being a kid appeals to an adult - true and everlasting friendship, wonder, big emotions, awestriking revelations and coming of age, whatever. Simple, explicable personalities. Simple lives.
I don't doubt those can be part of childhood, but I remember something uniquely lonely and confusing and surreal about being a kid. Kids don't really have the perspective to make snappy narratives of themselves. Kids' worlds are sprawling and rambling and badly edited. Kids' interests aren't the memetic adult versions of themselves, but intense and unselfaware and without any sense of proportion whatsoever.
So that all went into my thinking about Carlo. Carlo was 11 and was too old and too young to have a really cohesive narrative of himself: he just was, and being kind of sucked for him at this time of his life. School was getting hard for reasons he didn't understand. It was better to subsume himself completely in his passionate interest, which was mecha and aces and the nobility and tragedy of war as the books told it and all the cool specs on machines.
That's one thing I definitely remember about being a kid. There comes a point (sometimes very early) when being your own age is just unbearable and confusing, the center cannot hold, and it's easier to think of yourself just as a pure concentrated fountain of what it is you most care about so you don't have to be on trial.
For me, that was cetaceans and the ocean, which explains a lot about my other game. For Carlo, that's mech factoids—but he's old enough to start being embarrassed about that.
I also like Paul Wang's Choice of Games game Mecha Ace: Heroes of the Vedrian War a lot, and I imagined Carlo would too. Even the very dark and tragic portrayals here would appeal to him as an alluring source of meaning. That's rather the thing about war narratives, isn't it?
One thing that developed about Carlo very quickly was that he found himself a lot more cautious and suspicious in practice than in theory: he was ready at any moment to find that he was being lied to by Alice or otherwise manipulated or made a fool of. Of course, even his skepticism was very naive.
But for a struggling eleven-year-old, having your dream drop into your lap is a little too good to be true. Or might be. He wanted to believe so badly, so all the more reason to play it cool.
—That made it all the more painful and poignant for me as he developed a sense of hesitant, non-explicitly-voiced sense of empathy and responsibility to Alice and to helping her be laid to rest. It's hard to be a kid! It's hard to be really, really transparent at the time when you feel the most cloudy.
Feelings on the game: It was really fun. We had a lovely time and I especially enjoyed the brief vividness of the prompts, which are so creatively inspirational. Thank you, Role Over Play Dead, for your heartbreaking little storygame and the entertainment it gave to a long-distance relationship.
I also am really sad now. I am a pacifist and I am always wondering how to tell stories in genres like this in a way that doesn't attribute false meaning to annihilation, how to counteract that old maybe-apocryphal Truffaut problem about war movies. I don't and may never know if I succeeded with my part of this here, nor with anything else, but my primary hope—telling a compelling story about two characters—definitely came true.
We ended up playing out a sad, lonely set of vignettes about a dead soldier who comes face to face with some harsh things about death, war, and fragile existence through her brief connection to a living child—and a living child who learns something about the past, and also about the value of his own one human life. The story spanned just a few nights in-game, and about six hours of play out of it: taking Carlo and the Gorgon/Alice between a construction site, a gorge and underground stream, and a city choked with barbed wire and civil unrest.
The system premise: In ECH0, the players take the roles of what amounts to a technological ghost—an ECH0 drive of the memory and consciousness of a dead mecha pilot from a past war—and the children that discover it and go on a little quest to look for the ruins of mecha and return the pilot ECH0 to their mech.
In our case, there were just two of us, so this ended up being a two-character game. The game also contains basic tables to roll on for prompts: you decide some basic things about the setting, draw a map as you go, and find out about the ruins you discover.
The players: I played this in two sessions with my partner,
gogollescent, as we were looking for a good remote activity to do together and had collectively amassed an archive of storygame pdfs from itch.io and the like and she had a copy of ECH0. We both like RP and TTRPGs in particular and are already in a four-person game together (Blades in the Dark) (that is certainly still going) (I GM this) (my god is it still going, and no regrets! ♥)[2022 ETA: you can now check out her writeup of ECH0 and another game we played, Debrief!]
We're also both fans of the Friends at the Table actual play podcast season Counter/Weight, which is mecha-themed - I also have some very dim nostalgia of mecha anime, primarily Gundam, from the early 2000s, but my memory dwindles. Since we also both dig depressing and elegiac, and the potential of child narrators for scope limitations on tragic and epic stories, this interested us both.
Relevant storygame comparisons: I actually cannot remember most of the storygames I've played, since most underwhelmed me in execution compared to concept - which I say without rancor, as most are also tossed together on a lark, which is a good and noble thing to do with one's time.
That being said, I do really like the game Lovecraftesque and in a lot of ways the ECH0 experience pleasantly reminded me of it but in a more low-key and structured way, with more potential for 'zooming' in and out, abstracting, and playing and narrating just as much as we thought fitting.
Platform: We played over voice and video through Roll20.net, where we used the dice roller a couple of times and
gogollescent drew an increasingly lovely sketched-out map of the environs.Time: Two sittings, about 6 hours total.
Story premise: We rolled a die to figure out who was going to be the pilot's ECH0 drive and who the child. I ended up playing the child and
gogollescent the dead pilot ECH0 and started our worldbuilding from there: we decided the war was very recent, just ending around the time of the birth of my character (who was about 11 years old), and that the game took place on a defeated and conquered planet.My character, Carlo, was the son of occupying settlers: two defense contractors come to work on a base developing an arid, rural region of the new colonial holding. He was eleven, unfamiliar with much of the history of his world and knowing very little outside his lonely dusty existence and his military base school for settlers' kids - but with a fervent childish passion for mechs and mecha pilots of the past war, as though they were Pokemon or baseball cards.
Though he lacked much context for the significance, he could always recite specs and tales of daring deeds and honorable rivalries and glamorous aces. He dreamed of one day becoming a pilot himself, maybe not entirely disconnected from his increasing struggles and falling behind in school and feeling of confusion and alienation from his family and environment.
gogollescent's character, who went by the callsign the Gorgon, was a downed mecha ace pilot from the previous anti-imperial war. gogollescent can expand more on her character herself, but in short the Gorgon's experience of war was a grim conflict of attrition, and of being the last holdout against an increasingly overpowering conquering force - where guerrilla deeds, morale, strength of will, and skills can only go so far against the seemingly endless resources of the other side throwing all they've got at you. (It was fun to come up with these concepts at the same time, with Carlo admiring a very romanticized version of this: which I gather was sort of cute to the Gorgon and sort of a sign of the ultimate humiliation in defeat, which is when the enemy's children admire a tragic, neutered version of your story.) Her background alluded to a fraught relationship with just a couple of other pilots she was forced to stick by in her unit, until it was just her.An interesting, lightly touched on part of the Gorgon's backstory was that she was actually from the outer (mining asteroid) colonies of this rebellious homeworld: so not even really at-home in the vanquished romantic world.
Her name turned out at the very end of the story to be Alice, although I don't know when
gogollescent came up with this, actually! One fun element of this game and both our RP style was that we hardly discussed it all OOC until afterward, so we were both uncovering a mystery at the same time we were improvising it.The world:
gogollescent drew a very nice oekaki-type mouse drawing map in Roll20. It was a simple setup, with Carlo's small base hometown including his school and the construction site where he'd trespass and initially found Alice's ECH0 drive, and direction arrows noting where the wilderness unfolds from there.I had a vague image of this area as being very arid with a river and river gorges, sort of like [[pictures I've seen of, I am American]] parts of Northern Territory, Australia. Not reflective of the planet—we didn't go much into the scope of the planet in this game, much less the galaxy or whatnot—but at least the area where Carlo's family resided and worked. There was also a city about an hour away by bus, which Carlo mentioned as being a destination for field trips and also (casually) full of troops and barbed wire and segregated sections due to "political problems" and "terrorism," with all the blase-ness of a kid who knew no other political situation.
The story [according to Carlo]: The game ECH0 is meant to unfold over a starting situation and then a series of a couple of journeys where the children find wreckage of mechs (with prompts from a table in the PDF) leading to a final journey where they find the ECH0 pilot's mech and lay them to rest. Since Carlo was only one kid, we decided on three journeys: two "regular" and one final.
That was interesting, because it meant figuring out who the pilots were for the first two wrecks, which largely fell to
gogollescent and Alice: the way ECH0 is set up, the kid(s) are largely determining the physical landscape of the "now" (what they see, what is left) and the pilot is largely determining the story of the "then" (what this really signifies, what secret histories or forgotten memories actually led up to this), which is a really fun RP division.I've been finding that I have the most fun with storygames when they have clear and yet really expansive boundaries around the roles or domains of the RPers: like the "GM" switchoff in Lovecraftesque. I find it's really easy for both people to get shy and too-hesitant when the boundaries are ill-defined: RPers (especially the personalities attracted to storygames, in my experience) are afraid of stepping on each other's toes, and the fewer demarcated roles, the more the fear of toe-stepping increases. I thought ECH0 had a good balance here.
Carlo first found Alice (then just known to him as "Gorgon") in ECH0 drive form in a derelict, frequently-redeveloped development hell construction site near his school. He was immediately both enchanted by and skeptical of her story—why would a heroic fallen rebel mecha ace bother to talk to a little kid?
But soon the apparent answer sufficed: she didn't have much of a choice in the matter. After all, she was an ECH0 drive: something between a ghost and a simulation. He was a little interested in the ontology of this and sometimes guardedly asked after what she was experiencing and feeling, but not more than he was interested in the story—and in very dangerous trespassing.
Thus commenced several concerning adventures, as far as child safety was concerned. First up was wreck one: according to the randomized table, Just a head and upper torso, the rest underground. A tunnel leads down into the hollowed-out wreck - someone's home? (I loved this visual immediately: the gargantuan ruin reminded me of Order from Counter/Weight as well as some stuff from Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind and Attack on Titan.)
It ended up being an eerie submerged, toxic-chemical-leaching, stripped-by-salvagers wreck buried both in water and in silt. There was an interesting interplay where Alice deduced this was an enemy (to her) mech taken down by her own team - one recurring theme was Carlo's observantness about his interest in mechs limited by his childlike and action-figure-ish exposure to them, vs Alice's actual experience - and an awkward back-and-forth where it sank into him, in the silence between lines, that a person actually died here, and was entombed in this.
This counted the first mention of some dead, historical comrades of Alice's whose story would unfold more as we played on—first mentioned as doomed rebellion heroes/antiheroes mythologized even by their enemies, especially one with the callsign Perseus (who accordingly had a rumored lover with the callsign Andromeda). Carlo had a bit of a hero-worship fascination with Perseus—sort of a Hector of Troy to him—who he'd heard had risen to heroic fame as a pilot even despite his dyslexia and dyscalculia that would have normally disqualified him—obviously Carlo, a kid struggling himself with some form of learning disability, saw a lot that was hopeful in this story.
To Alice, this was a reminder of something else: her cause's desperation, the chaos that made it possible for someone who'd otherwise be disqualified like Perseus to make it through the ranks and find accommodation of sorts, as long as that accommodation was used to fight. After all, they couldn't afford to be choosy. She knew this story well because Perseus was, in fact, her squadron mentor and leader. She was also familiar with the technology he leaned on as an accommodation.
At this same time, it also clearly occurred to her that she was going around with a kid into hazardous situations—although he didn't lack for wariness of the water, she was also concerned with the salvagers the wreck might attract. And so they continued on, and the issue of Alice's mortality uneasily rose higher in Carlo's mind.
The second wreck was rolled as Bolt upright on its feet. Displayed in a public square, outside a museum, or perhaps a military academy? I love fictional statues, memorials, and propaganda, and was immediately interested—however, it was clear this tableau wouldn't fit into Carlo's rural cattle station/military base hometown. So off on a city field trip he went, ECH0 drive in his pocket!
(There was a lot of cute awkward comic interaction here, including Alice admitting to him that she could hear 'a lot of pocket' when they were going around and Carlo immediately figuring out how to clip the ECH0 drive to his backpack with a lanyard clip.)
War statues are interesting and imply a sanitized, after-the-fact narrative. I was thinking about a displayed mech like something between a war hero's statue and a giant WWI Cenotaph. Carlo's class ended up passing through a massive security barrier onto a giant museum/historical site compound, where he sat at the feet of this big mech, among a lot of pigeons while his class took a lunch break. He explained what he did know about the mech: it was a famous "hero mech" called Hospitaller, which was piloted by a series of war heroes, most famously at the end by a doomed nineteen-year-old ace named Ramirez.
Here Carlo had the chance to observe some oddities about the Hospitaller mech—some elements of it that didn't match up with the story, including how it clearly couldn't be piloted alone.
The way Carlo knew this story, Ramirez was felled by Perseus. What Alice told him was very different from this government narrative—Ramirez had not been killed heroically in battle by Perseus, but had come to defect to Alice's side, and indeed he did. He went as far as to murder his copilot and gunner, Jordan Kim, in the effort. Ramirez was terminally ill and had originally joined up to make something of his final days as a young man, only to find what he was actually doing was making them terrifying as well as short—but he'd heard that the technology Perseus used to interact with real time had a time-dilating effect, could make life seem longer for him. He wanted that.
(Carlo was crestfallen and fascinated—crestfallen that a famous young hero in fact wanted to live more than he wanted to not betray his friend; and fascinated by the story all the same. It was also becoming clear, narratively, that Alice was starting to think better of glamorizing and glorifying the war to a child like Carlo, and was swallowing the bitter pill of being blunt with him instead.)
They had an exchange where he first claimed—with cynical feigned middle school cool—that if he were Ramirez, he'd do something else with his time, like maybe learn to cook. Alice praised his wisdom, which possibly was his motivation to go back on it: and more candidly admit, minutes later as a non sequitur, that wasn't true—he would've done it too. He would've done it in a heartbeat.
(It was on this grim note that we rolled on the table one more time, assuming that Carlo and Alice would return from Carlo's field trip and then go on a final journey to find Alice's mech. But we rolled: Someone built a house around this mech. The torso acts as a load-bearing pillar. An amazing living room display. A very surreal, interesting, morbid image—and also not very at-home in the cattle station military base. So we backtracked a little and kept the scene on Carlo's field trip for the finale.)
There were protesters mentioned—by Carlo, too naive and detached to know what about exactly or how seriously—in the original field trip. For this new scene, the escalating protest forced the field trip to stay put in a lockdown at the museum compound as the situation was deemed too unsafe for bus travel. Carlo, curious and restless, snuck out under the fence—not entirely unaware of Alice's probable opinion of this choice, as he only told her this after he did so—and wanted to take a closer look at things.
What he found, terribly and inevitably, was a protest surrounding Alice's mech: something that had been uncovered and turned into a garish art display, which protesters wanted to see returned to the hands of locals and respected, with a chant of bring her home! Or at least that was the probable implication: one of the most interesting recurring things about the premise of ECH0 is, since it was confined (as we played it) to Carlo's narration and Alice's responses, we'd never really know for sure. But she recognized the description of the paint.
At this point, seeing sights and telling the truth of history was no longer meaningful to Alice. She had let a young kid get into a very dangerous, violent situation and though she couldn't do anything for herself any more, she could do something for him, at least, a little. It was a fascinating and painful finale where her careful control—as the battery keeping her "alive" was failing—was all focused on getting him out (instructing him on a cloth mask for tear gas, telling him it didn't matter what happened to her mech) without frightening him. He was old enough to realize this, to some extent, but still obeyed.
I found the most painful and poignant element of this to be my uncertainty as to whether Alice was telling the truth to Carlo on one last particular thing, one of his last questions to her ever: whether her body was entombed with her mech at the site of conflict. She said straight out that she was sure she'd ejected, and must have died near where he found her ECH0 drive, clearly. The thing is this could very well be true, in the logic of the story—I just knew (and probably Carlo will know, for the rest of his life, as he gets older) that it's what she would say anyway to him, if that was what it took to get him to run.
It was during this last conversation that he asked her for her real name, but it colored the rest of the story in hindsight (as did many other things) so I have a hard time thinking of her by something else.
Thoughts on playing Carlo: Playing and writing kids is interesting. I think a lot of fictional kids' portrayals suffer from being kind of the genre vehicles of adults' wistfulnesss about childhood, or at least what about the fantasy world of being a kid appeals to an adult - true and everlasting friendship, wonder, big emotions, awestriking revelations and coming of age, whatever. Simple, explicable personalities. Simple lives.
I don't doubt those can be part of childhood, but I remember something uniquely lonely and confusing and surreal about being a kid. Kids don't really have the perspective to make snappy narratives of themselves. Kids' worlds are sprawling and rambling and badly edited. Kids' interests aren't the memetic adult versions of themselves, but intense and unselfaware and without any sense of proportion whatsoever.
So that all went into my thinking about Carlo. Carlo was 11 and was too old and too young to have a really cohesive narrative of himself: he just was, and being kind of sucked for him at this time of his life. School was getting hard for reasons he didn't understand. It was better to subsume himself completely in his passionate interest, which was mecha and aces and the nobility and tragedy of war as the books told it and all the cool specs on machines.
That's one thing I definitely remember about being a kid. There comes a point (sometimes very early) when being your own age is just unbearable and confusing, the center cannot hold, and it's easier to think of yourself just as a pure concentrated fountain of what it is you most care about so you don't have to be on trial.
For me, that was cetaceans and the ocean, which explains a lot about my other game. For Carlo, that's mech factoids—but he's old enough to start being embarrassed about that.
I also like Paul Wang's Choice of Games game Mecha Ace: Heroes of the Vedrian War a lot, and I imagined Carlo would too. Even the very dark and tragic portrayals here would appeal to him as an alluring source of meaning. That's rather the thing about war narratives, isn't it?
One thing that developed about Carlo very quickly was that he found himself a lot more cautious and suspicious in practice than in theory: he was ready at any moment to find that he was being lied to by Alice or otherwise manipulated or made a fool of. Of course, even his skepticism was very naive.
But for a struggling eleven-year-old, having your dream drop into your lap is a little too good to be true. Or might be. He wanted to believe so badly, so all the more reason to play it cool.
—That made it all the more painful and poignant for me as he developed a sense of hesitant, non-explicitly-voiced sense of empathy and responsibility to Alice and to helping her be laid to rest. It's hard to be a kid! It's hard to be really, really transparent at the time when you feel the most cloudy.
Feelings on the game: It was really fun. We had a lovely time and I especially enjoyed the brief vividness of the prompts, which are so creatively inspirational. Thank you, Role Over Play Dead, for your heartbreaking little storygame and the entertainment it gave to a long-distance relationship.
I also am really sad now. I am a pacifist and I am always wondering how to tell stories in genres like this in a way that doesn't attribute false meaning to annihilation, how to counteract that old maybe-apocryphal Truffaut problem about war movies. I don't and may never know if I succeeded with my part of this here, nor with anything else, but my primary hope—telling a compelling story about two characters—definitely came true.