Walkabout Opening Monologue

Here's what I'm currently thinking. I'm not sure if it feels quite right yet, I'm sure it will undergo a few revisions and changes before the final version.

"This game was written on the lands of the Tharawal, the Barapa Barapa, the Yorta Yorta, and the Wiradjuri people. It was written in consultation with elders and other members of the Tharawal, Wiradjuri, and Kamilaroi people. It is hoped that the writing and the concepts expressed within its pages pay appropriate homage and honour to the stories and beliefs of these indigenous communities and the lands where they make their homes.

This game tells stories, and those stories are both social and political. It is a game that tells stories about relationships between people and the land, between people and the communities around them, between people and the spirits that give them life.

This is a game of analogy and metaphor, it is about belief and how people who try to understand the world through metaphors sometimes come to believe those metaphors are the reality.

This game is meta. It is a game that tells stories, but within those stories are other stories, these stories about stories build up a rich network of relationships and provide insight into the communities depicted. Stories are a deep cultural part of the indigenous lands on which this game was written, they form the framework for the Dreaming and inform the traditions, customs, and principles of the people who remember them. The stories of the Dreaming are living breathing things, not relics of the past, they have been changed with the assimilation of stories from convicts and colonists, some have been oppressed, and some have grown despite the attempts to destroy them. This game makes no pretense about adding “big important things” to the stories of the Dreaming, but strives to reinvigorate some of those stories by introducing them to new audiences, and allowing those audiences to transform elements of those stories and adapt them into something new that might inform their own traditions, customs and principles.  

This game can be serious, but it doesn’t need to be. The stories it tells are about people, the choices they make and the repercussions of those choices. Sometimes repercussions can be profound, grim, or deadly, sometimes they can be light or humorous; both the dark and the light provide valuable insight. It is not a game to tell stories about “great white saviours” who bring enlightenment to the savage wastelands, nor is it about “magical black men” with hidden insight to right the wrongs of colonialism. It is a game about people faced with difficult choices, there are no instant fixes, and sometimes things need to be broken and ripped apart before they can be properly healed.  

This game is a set of tools to tell your stories. It provides ideas, settings, fragments of narrative that can be added into your group’s tales, and offers hints on how those elements might be utilised to tell a yarn that might take on a life of its own."

I feel the tone and underlying messages of this game are really important and want to make sure they're established from the beginning. On one hand, I'm a little worried they might seem a bit heavy handed; on the other hand it might be an active deterrent to the kinds of players who wouldn't really get the game anyway.

 



(Header image from Wikimedia Commons, by Gabriele Delhey, CC BY-SA 3.0)