How and Why I Shock

After the somewhat abstract discussion of shock and horror in games and other media, I thought I would give a few examples of how and why I've used elements of sexuality and the abnormal body in play.

1. The Unfortunate Troglodyte. Some players in my Castle of the Mad Archmage cellar level have come across a chained, pathetic troglodyte with a raw wound between its legs. This sight had more power to shock than I thought it would. The players in question were left disturbed by this seemingly senseless castration.

In fact, the surgery was more of a pragmatic move on the part of some kobolds, who wanted to remove its defensive stench glands and at the same time gain a chemical weapon, glands in a bag.

The point I wanted to make: It's a tough, nasty, competitive world; especially when it comes to this one kobold tribe.

The point my players took away: It's a pointlessly violent, sexually threatening world. Was that a success?

2. Grind Your Bones To Make My Bread. As blogged a long while ago, my first recent campaign kicked off with a horrific plot involving a body-grinding millwheel, whose demonic bone fertilizer created bumper crops. The horror involved evidence of a kidnapped lumberjack, and many others, having fallen victim to the wheel, as well as a number of flaccid half-vegetable Lovecraftian things in the cellars below.

The point I wanted to make: Semi-satire on medieval suspicion of technology and conflation with demons and magic.

The point my players took away: They were very wary and cautious with anything they found in that area, scared of things I'd just put in there as dungeon dressing. The idea of contagious, invisible evil established itself. I think that was a success, transporting the players to a demon-haunted world.

3. Feisty Fiona. An NPC in the current campaign, recurrent by grace of the crazy coincidence roll, is getting a reputation. After the appropriate carousing roll was made, she wound up sleeping with a PC, which I handled in a discreet, three-asterisks manner*. Later, she showed up in a different town with a young "bodyguard" in tow, and loud bangings and moanings were heard from the direction of their inn room.

The point I wanted to make: There are lively characters in this world, memorable and controversial.

The point my players took away: At least one of them was more scandalized by Fiona than I expected. I think they get the point, though.

* I must confess I lack the sexual charisma of an Ed Greenwood to be able to pull that kind of scene off any other way ...

To sum up, knowing the group is key to making these elements come off as intended. And even if they don't, that's not always a bad thing.

How and Why To Shock

We can extend last post's discussion from sex to extreme violence, sadism, body horror ... but keep the focus on how people react and what they think about the author who transgresses taboos in a game or fiction.

When any creator tries for shock value, in whatever kind of narrative - writing, game, TV, film - there are two kinds of how it is done.  One way is to contrast the taboo-breaking to a recognizable version of our normal reality. The other is to have it as a norm in the setting - a whole world gone horribly or gloriously mad. That is, you can either have a world where one family in the peaceful village is secretly cannibalistic demon-worshipers (isolated shock), or where the whole world is (pervasive shock).

A harder job is to figure out why it is done. Perhaps the creator's actual purpose is not so important as the effect it has on the audience. But second-guessing of the creator's motives is always going to go on, and cues in the work may push the audience one way or another. If we just discuss effects, we avoid the tricky problem of the author's intention - is it wish fulfillment? moralization? sheer desire to disturb? - and also confront the possibility that the work might have unintended effects on any given audience.

Effects of isolated shock include:

* Contrast. At the most basic artistic level, the shocking element provides the goal of an investigation or adventure. It gives a dramatic, attention-catching payoff of surprise. In an interactive medium, it can also give clarity to a muddled situation - this thing is clearly an abomination, it needs to go!

* Demonization. A point is taken about things linked to the abomination - sex is bad, drugs are bad, religion is bad. Sometimes, in slippery-slope logic, the greater evil is a stand-in for some lesser form of deviance like homosexuality, race (or racism), unbelief. Sympathies are with the normal community trying to root it out, and if they're oblivious, this just makes a more effective call to arms for the crusade.

* Hypocrisy-bashing. The take-home message here: apparently normal society shares essential traits with the abomination it's so horrified with, maybe to the point of being more monstrous than the monster. This can be done savagely, by making the monster-haters ugly and brutal, or gently, by emphasizing the humanity of the apparent monstrosity. A related theme is to satirize conformist efforts to keep up normal appearances and ignore the monstrous, as in Jaws and many other films.

When shock becomes pervasive, this can convey:

* Existential stress. A "world gone mad" has an artistic effect of unhinging the audience, creating an atmosphere of constant and pervasive threat to one's values and assumptions. Note the difference with contrast. There, the viewer and protagonists have a solid ground and safe space to retreat to, whereas here, both of them are marooned in an existentially hostile world where rules of sex, rules for bodies, rules for eating are profoundly and disturbingly different.

* Dystopia. Endemic wrongness is often taken as the bottom splashdown of the slippery slope, calling out an evil in the world not by isolating it, but by imagining it taken to the farthest extreme. "If you let men marry men, pretty soon, incest and bestiality will not only be acceptable but fashionable!" "The logical consequence of sexism is the owning of women as property!" A fairly standard character in dystopia (as in Brave New World or 1984) is the one character who for some reason is "old-fashioned" and stands in for the audience's sensibilities.

* Relativism. Just as isolated shock has culturally conformist and nonconformist interpretations, so does pervasive shock. The nonconformist version of dystopia leads to a questioning of the very basis of taboos we take for granted, through one of two means. Either the taboo-breakers are portrayed sympathetically ( for example, Donald Kingsbury's SF novel Courtship Rite depicts a harsh, protein-poor planet where cannibalism is normal and institutionalized), or the reader's society is contrasted against the transgressive one in an unflattering light ( for example, Piers Anthony's short story "In The Barn," where an explorer of alternate universes finds one in which humans, lobotomized from birth, are used for meat and milk, and reflects on what an explorer from another universe might think of our own treatment of animals.) 


Finally, there are two reactions which have been presumed in both of these genres of shock.


* Wish-fulfillment. Based on the assumption that each taboo covers a deep dark desire, one presumed intention or effect of portraying shocking things is the vicarious service of such desires, both in the author and the audience. Undoubtedly this is the case for some, but how much we really want to break taboos may be overstated. The possibility of wish-fulfillment, though, does make for some good hypocrisy-bashing and relativism aimed at the audience itself. Nobody who's seen Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds can escape its point that the Nazis cheering the imaginary violence at their film premiere are uncomfortably mirrored by the audience cheering the imaginary violence against the self-same Nazis.


* Desensitization. This is less of a goal for authors, than an unintended side-effect. The Technicolor gore of 1978's Dawn of the Dead now looks laughable and primitive; pornography has ritualized a certain kind of sex so much that the only way to shock people now is to present sexual bodies that are hairy, lumpy and ugly. Desensitization has been a concern of regulators and moralists for a long time, exemplified most tellingly in the strictures of the Comics Code of the mid-20th century, which required not just that evil be punished but that it not be depicted overly graphically. This assumes only thing keeping us away from committing vile sins ourselves is innate revulsion, which can be desensitized by repeated exposure, much as medical students get used to the feel of cadavers.


Well, that's quite a scheme there. I'll let that sit, and pick up again with the ways these categories can be applied to confrontations with the past.