Jeepform

Growing Up is explicitly intended as a jeepform implementation of Austen's Sense and Sensibility. In this, it has both strengths and weaknesses.

The jeepform is a particular style of Nordic larp involving short play times, small casts, recurring use of a suite of techniques discussed at the jeepen.org site, and often involving uncomfortable situations for the players, along with improvisational roleplay. In Growing Up, the players are expected to roleplay through 21 short (12 minute or so) "chapters" that recapitulate the story of Austen's novel.

The Visitor won the Little Game Chef 2010 competition, in which designers were invited to write up brief comedic roleplaying games that incorporated at least three of the following four elements: Bond, holiday, starfish, and recall. (The rules of the competition are here.)

The setup of The Visitor is that of a sitcom; starfish-like aliens have come to Earth and the US government is in contact with them, though their presence is secret from the public. They have demanded that one of their number be permitted to live with a normal American family to learn more about humanity.

The artform we acknowledge as being best at getting inside the heads of characters and saying something meaningful about life is the novel, largely because if its ability to portray interior monolog. Film is a distant second best, since it portrays the outward appearance of things, and is far less able to portray a character's interior life.

Games don't normally ever qualify, since they are best at showing process and action. But what if you did a game that was fundamentally about the interior lives of characters?

I am now officially tired of the "why can't we have games that do ______?" conversation. Like, you know "games can't do conversations, games can't do tragedy, games can't do X, Y, and Z", so we're stuck with nothing but Gears of War until the end of time.

Some years ago, at Fastaval in Århus, Denmark, I had one of the most splendid, if brief, roleplaying experiences in my life, in a mixed company of Danes, Swedes, and Finns, who partially in my honor and partially because English was the only language they had in common, chose to play with me in a language I found comprehensible. The game we played was The Upgrade; and it's a source of some little frustration that, reading over the materials they've used to present it to the world, my main emotion is a sense of dissatisfaction that the prose itself does not impart a clear notion of the pleasure to be gained by experiencing this remarkable ouevre. In part, perhaps, this is because it is translated from the Swedish (and for those who read it, a version in the original tongue is also available via the link above); but in part, it is also because some things that can be experienced in play are impossible to express in the more mundane form of the words used to describe their rules. Not always, to be sure; in reading, say, My Life With Master, you obtain a sense of the genius that likes within; but in the case of The Upgrade, surely, you do indeed need to play the game to understand what it has to offer.