cropped image of two people wrestling on the floor of an amphitheatre. cut out is the heads of the people in the rows in front watching. the audience is not as important as the action.
in the Theatre of the Millionstar you are the guest and performer. on stage you are called on from the audience to fight.
this is a detail in the game Ripples of Direction: Thoughtmind Odyssey (2014). trying to find a copy of this game you can download it from fakegame.realwebsite.fake
the smell of the sweat as you all strip down is interesting, that you expected the other performers to worry as much about their body stink as you do. washing yourself in the bathroom whenever you arrive anywhere. body temperature soaring down to the chemicals that keep you attached to yourself.
Ripples of Direction was developed in tandem with a graphic novel called Arrangement of Anxiety, about a single shuttlecraft aiming to land on Ferringmason (the city planet where the Theatre is located). It was funded as part of the stretch goal funding for the game, which received about 200% of its ask in 2012. People really liked the screenshots.
In that graphic novel the character Illiopon has a dream about performing on the stage that they have only seen in the broadcasts across Galaxynet. In the dream the floor is so sweaty and bloody that they slip and end up writhing around in this wetness for the rest of the fight. People aren’t happy, this base explosion of weird pleasure doesn’t serve the aggro purpose of the fight. It’s just plain weird.
The game never sold many copies on condition of not being real, as well as being a fighting simulator with impenetrable lore that doesn’t go anywhere outside of an endless string of generated characters having entertainment fights on stage with no hierarchy of progression or other acclaim. The winner gets nothing. the egos don’t get to fight again, as a player, you inhabit each fight a new person in the audience.
It’s a string, pull it and it’s wrapped around a top, the top spins and falls over. Pull it again. Hypnotic satisfaction.
In the theatre a photographer captures images of each fight. They also have a side hustle making posed softcore versions of fight photography for magazines. These photos have a kind of plastic quality to them, as in, made rather than captured. Moulded rather than opportunistic, or perhaps, simply opportunism is using someone elses mould.
They consider the differences smoking outside the theatre one night, each distinction they draw there’s a frame they can think of to make it so that really they’re the same. No distinction. No need to separate. Entertainment fictions. They finish their smoke and head back inside.
GlitchOut 