This topic has 17 replies, 16 voices, and was last updated 7 years, 6 months ago by 
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I know there’s been a lot of conversation about recent events today, and after a few of my own (thanks @mkarrett!) I decided to look at a few things through a different lens. This is all meta, OOG conversation, but they are reminders that seemed worth sharing with y’all here.
There’s More than Noah and Sarah
I know some participants have really responded to the Noah and Sarah storyline, and I am psyched for them! Noah didn’t really speak to me at the start — and that was before the dick decided to blackmail me — but since then I’ve really been into the AI/robots-not-robots of it all. But if you’re still not buying what the Sinclairs are selling, it’s important to remember they’re just one sliver of a much larger world.We already have iConfidant. We have Otis Fletcher, and his crazy pets and Facebook friends. We have the larger concept tying these different entities together. And we also have The Creators straight-up saying we’re on “page one of the foreword.” There’s a lot of topics in the Circle of Lust, and getting too worried about Noah and Sarah right now will likely be the same as getting too hung up on Gatekeeper 5.
Jerky Characters Will Be Jerks
At first I was a little annoyed that Noah talked shit about @prufrock5150 to @lilmsfancpants, because @prufrock5150 is a super nice guy. When Sarah asked community members to go further, it seemed even more screwed up.But Noah and Sarah are manipulative jerks, doing what manipulative jerks do. If I learned one thing from Tension, it’s that characters in these worlds NEVER break character, unless it’s part of a huge story beat. So from that point of view, Noah being mad that Tom didn’t do whatever Tom didn’t do is actually a good thing. And if it makes us even more mad at Noah, then that’s emotional engagement — the coin of the realm.
Our Paths Are Our Own
Sarah did give community members a chance to “smear” the truth last night. That was an opportunity for everyone involved to put their own spin on things, and it seems to me that it was a litmus test: who would follow through in order to further their own self-interests? (Basically: Are you a Noah, or are you not?)I’m not going to dive into value judgements here because that’s not the point. I also don’t think the “anything’s okay because it was in game” argument is relevant. (Not all people play as characters — I don’t — and in my opinion that only works as a catch-all excuse when everybody has decided to play as a character.)
To my mind, the important thing about the moment was that it offered the selected a chance to define themselves, with ramifications to their storyline, and perhaps the way they are seen by the community. That’s…. actually why we’re all here. The opportunity to be the star in our own story. And we can’t be mad if a character asks us to do something hard or causes internal conflict. That’s their job.
Remember Why We’re Here
We are all on this forum because we took part in, or heard about, this crazy thing called The Tension Experience. And it was awesome. @kasch made a cool doc about it. And the people that made it (even if they’re now fired) came out of nowhere and kinda blew our minds. They blew our minds because they did something that many of us didn’t think was possible (I certainly didn’t).So now we’re in the beginning of this second chapter, and we don’t know what’s going on, and that lack of knowing is causing a ton of anxiety. Once again: that’s good. It means we’re off-balance. It means we have no idea what is coming anymore than the first few people in Indoctrination did when they walked into their first event.
The Creators used the word “trust” in an earlier post, and… yeah. We trusted them to hood us, drag us away in a van, put shit in our eyes, mock kill us on stage, strip us naked, makes us cry, rip us apart, and we all held hands while we saw that they’d killed our friends in the warehouse that final night.
That didn’t just go away, and it doesn’t make any sense to think that now that those same people have a ready and eager audience that they’re just going to randomly fumble the ball. We don’t quite see the outlines of this thing yet? Okay. If we knew exactly what was going on, and exactly what to expect, we would be bored. We would not be present. Any piece of immersive theater is a trust exercise: the actors and creators trust us, and we put trust in them. Particularly when they’ve earned it.
So let’s chill, enjoy our friends (because that’s what community is really about), and see where the hell this crazy thing is going. We get to take this ride; let’s remember that it is something special, and not to be taken for granted.
/deepthoughtsoff
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@bcbishop that was very sincere and heartfelt. ♡
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@bcbishop Mother fucking PREACH. <3
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Hell yes @bcbishop I think that was well said and NEEDED to be said. 🙂 Thank you for being so honest to the Community especially with a hot topic, that’s not the easiest thing to do.
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Thank you for the wisdom @bcbishop.
I tend to be a person of few words, so I’ll keep it brief:
I trust @the-creators implicitly. They are good people who genuinely care about the mental and physical safety of their audience. I believe in their capacity to tell a worthwhile story. These stories tends to fall in the realm of horror, and horror isn’t known to be about cute puppies and pretty rainbows. Characters we grow to love will die. Friends will be realized as enemies. All sorts of atrocities I haven’t even imagined could occur. This is what I’ve signed up for and I will enjoy the ride, even if that ride goes to dark places. In the end, I believe it will all have been worth it.
I don’t want to see anyone feel hurt or betrayed in a way that crosses over into the real world. If this Experience isn’t something a participant finds worthwhile to their life, I respect the choice to opt-out and the self awareness it takes to realize the opt-out is the best choice for that person.
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Thanks for this and well-said, @bcbishop. It’s so easy to forget there’s a bigger picture when we’ve only seen a small portion of it.
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Thanks for this @bcbishop. We can be patient with the story. Trusting ourselves AND each other. Preach it. ❤
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THANK YOU! I didn’t sign up for a “safe space.” I signed up to be shaken up. That’s what separates immersive theatre from all other forms of entertainment.
Yeah, there are times where I get super frustrated like everyone else. But all you have to do is put your trust in the people behind the scenes and realize that instant gratification isn’t what we signed up for. Great things take time.
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Absolutely, @bcbishop. Maybe I just don’t have a frame of reference because I wasn’t around until Ascension, but I’m constantly in awe of how much they’re able to fit into a week (or a day!) and how diverse this experience has been so far, and how involved many of us have been able to be. I’m loving the Sinclair story line and the dozen or so offshoots and possibilities blinking on the periphery. Certainly any consternation I’ve expressed has been strictly in game. I’m personally on the edge of my seat, or rather I’ve kicked my seat ten feet away and spinning around and looking in every direction. I would hope the same for everyone.
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I hope everyone gets the experience they want out of this. Like @kasch said, I also want to be tested. I’ve already gone out of my personality and done things that made me uncomfortable. I want this to be an experience to remember.
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@bcbishop I wholeheartedly agree with this.
One of the most amazing things about Tension to me is the strength of the community it created. In fact, one of my biggest hindsight regrets about Tension was that I wasn’t able to engage in that as much as I could have.
I think that regardless of who we side with, what paths we take, or what decisions we make in-game, we are all here because of the common desire to take part of this story. It’s wonderful to embrace our narrative and how personalized it is, but I also think it’s necessary to recognize and respect that no two people see things the same way. Even while this story tackles very personal and emotional topics, I believe it’s important not to take certain things personally and to respect how others play the game.
I do apologize if this is all redundant, but I do think there’s a lot of value in this community.
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Very well said, @bcbishop. As someone who didn’t come to Tension until the very very end, I’m thrilled by all the (seemingly) disparate directions this thing is going in. I love the Sarah and Noah plot, I think they’re fantastically realized characters, and I’m not super into the iConfidant thing (I haven’t even emailed her), and I love that this is a story in which I have the choice to form a path like that, choosing my various corners of a fully-realized world to create my own track. There’s truly nothing else like it that I’ve ever been a part of, and I’m super happy and excited to be here with you all. And if Noah and Sarah (or any character for that matter) end up upsetting me genuinely with something they do, that’s a testament in itself to how powerful this whole world is.
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I definitely agree with you all the way! However, did I miss something? Did something happened that this needed to be said? I feel like I’ve been keeping up pretty well with the forums and I haven’t noticed any complaints.. everyone seems pretty anxious and enthusiastic to me. Maybe I skipped over those topics.
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I have mentioned this metaphor before to a few people, but I feel like this is all a mirror shattering in reverse. We have no idea how many shards there are, their size, or where they lay, but we’re slowly watching them come together and eventually by the end, we’ll see the full mirror and ourselves reflected in it.
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Beautifully put, @meghanmayhem.
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Amen…. whats amazing to me is how personal all this is to me. That being said, inherently when something is so personal people have the ability to forget that this is a play/game, immersive theater whatever you’d like to call it. Point being it’s not personal, not from a creators perspective it’s just part of the story line. Not sure if that made since but it made since to me. LOL
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@bcbishop Still trying to get caught up on everything (when I should really be working) but just stumbled across this excellent thread. I had heard about the beta portion of Tension but hadn’t participated until the event (which I enjoyed immensely.) I was kicking myself for not having joined up sooner. From what I can see thus far, Lust is shaping up to be equally, if not more engaging. Here’s to trusting in complete strangers and trying to figure out what the hell is going on! ??
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