Ray, Jean-Charles, Roxanne Chartrand, and Kevser Güngör. 2024. “Enjoy the Silence: A Discussion Around Players’ Experience and Emotional Accessibility in Alice is Missing.” Japanese Journal of Analog Role-Playing Game Studies, 5: 78e-88e.
DOI: 10.14989/jarps_5_78e[0.1] In this paper, we examine how the silent role-playing game Alice is Missing structures an accessibility framework focused on minority representation and safe space regarding sensitive topics while questioning the limits posed by its archetypal setting. Thus, we consider accessibility through the means it deploys to welcome a variety of players and the way its safety tools can foster emotional experiences. We analyze this game using its own frame: a textual exchange. The idea is to recapture our experience during the game by reproducing the text dialogue structure we were offered. This approach is rooted in the idea of dialogism as a point of encounter and synthesis of individual realities and in what seems to us one of the central propositions of Alice is Missing, that is, a collaborative creative experience that aims to respect each participants’ individuality.
[0.2] Keywords: Accessibility, emotional safety, minority representation, player experience, textual role-play
[0.3] 本稿では，サイレントロールプレイングゲーム『Alice is Missing』が，マイノリティの表象やセンシティブなトピックに関する安全な空間の創出に焦点を当てたアクセシビリティフレームワークをどのように構築しているか，またその典型的な設定がもたらす限界を問い直すかを検討する．したがって，本研究では，多様なプレイヤーを受け入れるためにゲームが採用する手法や，安全性ツールがどのように感情的な体験を促進するかを通じて，アクセシビリティを考察する．本稿の分析は，ゲームそのものが提供する枠組み，すなわちテキスト交換を用いて行われる．本研究の目的は，プレイ中に得られた体験を再現するため，ゲーム内で提示されたテキスト対話構造を再構築することである．このアプローチは，対話主義を個別的現実の出会いと統合の場として捉える考え方に基づくものであり，また『Alice is Missing』の中心的な提案の一つ，すなわち各参加者の個性を尊重することを目指した協働的創造体験という理念にも根ざしている．
[0.4] キーワード：アクセシビリティ，感情的安全性，マイノリティの表象，プレイヤー体験，テキストロールプレイ
Hi there! I will be the authors’ collective consciousness regarding concepts and references for the duration of this paper. Part moderator, part narrator and part academic superego, if you will. Let’s begin by stating that, in this introduction, Jean-Charles refers to Coralie David who defined role-playing games as games where “the system comes to support [the players] in the intercreative process by structuring their total creative and decision-making power over the diegetic elements, a power that makes this universe absolutely interactive, immersive and welcoming for all the narratives they may collectively develop within it” (David 2019, 67). The authors wanted to explore the epistemological potential of this dynamic, and propose a paper in which each person’s feelings enter into dialogue within a structure provided by the theoretical framework. This approach also overlaps with the definition of role-playing author Romaric Briand, for whom “role-playing game is a social game which rules aim to establish a maelstrom during its sessions, i.e., to organize a collective reflection on situations in order to elaborate innumerable propositions about the malleable fictional content of the game” (Briand 2015, n.p.). Following this perspective, Jean-Charles pointed out how role-playing games constitute a collective creative process, deploying the potentialities of fictional content that is fixed only after the fact. While this definition is particularly well-suited to “story games,” which assert a narrative-creation objective, Jean-Charles is of the opinion that these games are ultimately merely a crystallization of the fictional dynamics developed in role-playing games in general. This is why he believes that the study of role-playing games is an opportunity to forge new theoretical tools that make more profound use of collective work. They thought, therefore I am!↩︎
[1.1] Jean-Charles Ray (JCR): Hello to you both! Before we begin, I just wanted to set out a bit of a framework for our approach and emphasize that we seek to give ourselves a structure for collectively developing a theoretical production that welcomes our respective perspectives and experiences. We have decided to start from our impressions and feelings of play and bring them into dialogue, supported by our theoretical frameworks and our very own Theory Teller.1 Through our play experience of Alice is Missing, we want to tackle the issue of accessibility both in the sense of how welcoming the game is and how it offers frames that help to attain emotional safety. We want to analyze how the game allows first-time players that don’t have the codes of role-playing to take part and how the safety tools it offers allow for emotional vulnerability and play.2 Let’s hope this experiment proves fruitful for all three of us! That said, I’m the one who suggested we play Alice is Missing, and before we go any further, I’d like to give you the floor and ask you how you’d describe the game.
“Accessibility” has multiple meanings, some of which include physical and psychological accessibility and, more generally, disability as a barrier to role-playing. Within the framework of this article, however, the authors chose to refrain from exploring these avenues for a simple reason: as it is largely based on their personal experience of Alice is Missing, and none of them are dealing with such disabilities, they did not feel comfortable extending their own feelings to a more general observation. On the other hand, the reflections they put forward in the following pages do address issues of players’ emotional well-being as well as barriers of entry for non-role-players, which they consider to be important topics in the context of a broader discussion on accessibility in tabletop role-playing games.↩︎
[1.2] Kevser Güngör (KG): Alice is Missing is a game entirely played through text message dialogues. We aimed to solve the mystery of Alice’s disappearance through our conversation. The game was set in a small town in California, where we played the roles of her friends and classmates during the winter break following her disappearance. We started by weaving a narrative around other characters (the locals) and places (the lighthouse, the train station, etc.) by sharing our memories related to Alice. Each of us had a secret that influenced our role-play. During our 90-minute game session, we each had the opportunity to move the story along by implementing what certain Clue Cards told us to do in our investigation. These were pivotal and incrementally heightened the tense atmosphere of the game.
In truth, Roxanne acknowledges that text-based TRPGs are not a unique or revolutionary thing by any means – as highlighted by Hammer and Czege, players have been role-playing through written means for a long time, even by mail (2024, 171). In fact, Roxanne mentioned to me that one of her first experiences with role-playing, in general, was through an online forum where she role-played as an assistant professor in Astronomy at Hogwarts. That being said, she believes the context of the instant messaging system as the main channel of communication within the diegetic context of the game is a unique setting.↩︎
Roxanne’s statement is supported by Winardy et al. (2024), which states that text-based TRPG seems to have the capacity to generate powerful emotions in players that persist outside of gameplay. Speaking of grief and hardship, among others, the authors write that experiencing them during a text-based role-play session might “allow [players to] better to understand these emotions in a safe and controlled environment.” It is important to note, however, that the views of our three authors on emotional safety and accessibility are shaped by their game-studies background. They do not aim to offer a psychological framework through which one could study the possible impacts of TRPGs in a therapeutical context. For a very interesting overview of the work that has been done in this field, see Bowman and Lieberoth (2018)↩︎.
[1.3] Roxanne Chartrand (RC): Kevser, you offered a great overview. I’m not sure what to add! I think, for my part, Alice is Missing would be first and foremost characterized by its rather unique mode of interaction.3 After the initial setup, the players are asked to communicate only in written form. This creates an interesting atmosphere that allowed me to feel a little more comfortable acting out the part of a teenager going through such an intense moment as the disappearance of a friend.4
Interestingly, Kevser further explained to me how silence appears to her as the most paradoxical mechanic of Alice is Missing in terms of accessibility and emotional safety. She described that, on the one hand, it acts as a “safety blanket” wrapped around the players to ease them into the game and comfort them in their role-play, i.e., make role-play relatively more accessible. Shrouded in silence, voice and body are no longer the mediums of role-play. Silence thus effectively moves the point of access of role-play from body to text, adding a layer of distance that can strengthen the boundary between player and character and prevent emotional bleed. The player is freed from the pressure of “full-body” role-play, which can often be intimidating and even overwhelming at times for first-time players. On the other hand, she remarked that silence can as well act as a “straitjacket” and can be a source of malaise if it becomes too noticeable as can be the case when the players get up to pick cards or look up to watch the countdown. She pointed out that silence is generally acknowledged to be a sign of awkwardness and a source of malaise in social settings, whereas, in Alice is Missing, it goes even further: silence quite literally neutralizes the bodies at play, which could be viewed, from Kevser’s perspective, as so many eerie reminders of the “missing” presence of the players’ fictional friend, Alice.↩︎
Let’s imagine these gaps as many “space[s] of possibility,” to borrow from Salen and Zimmerman (Salen and Zimmerman 2003, 67) that allow for the generation and proliferation of player-made narratives.↩︎
[1.4] KG: I agree with you, Roxanne! The atmosphere of this game is really something! Peculiar and tense yet intriguing and thrilling. And I believe it has a lot to do with silence. Although the textual nature of the game did play a part in making me focus on my screen, I would argue that silence itself played an even more significant role in making me forget my surroundings. At times, when I would look up to see how many minutes were left, I would be struck by how quiet the room was. It heightened the sense of urgency in solving the mystery before the time ran out. In those moments, I sometimes attempted to glimpse something out of your facial expressions, but to no avail, as both of you were perfectly neutral.5 This makes me think that Alice is Missing is a game that lies within the gaps, the silences, the blanks, the places where things are “missing,” which become filled with the (emotional) significance we invest. I believe it revolves around the heavy and sometimes overwhelming presence of absence, both in its forms – as informational gaps we fill as players – and contents – in the form of a missing friend.6 Isn’t it the whole point of the game, after all, to chase after the unresolved, i.e., the silence left after Alice’s unexplained disappearance, and fill in the gaps of her absence with our answers? This demanded our active reception and our consistent and continual interpretation of original or occurring narrative gaps throughout the game. In other words, it is a game of gaps: a loop around these narrative gaps gets created via the player-reader dynamic, gaps which are then encircled and mended with the players’ creative performative input.
Here, we have to keep in mind that the game’s designer, Spenser Starke, comes from the film industry and is part of the Critical Role team, an actual play group. He has stated that his role-playing practice is primarily concerned with the shared construction of narratives with a cinematic dimension (Legends of Avantris 2023), an orientation that is strongly reflected in Alice is Missing. In this, Jean-Charles sees the game as a continuation of a tradition of narrative role-playing that, according to Jon Peterson (Peterson 2020, 20–21), began as early as the 1970s, with contributions from the science-fiction fan community. More recently, creators such as Avery Alder, Vincent and Meguey Baker have greatly deepened this vein by developing shared narrative authority. Alice is Missing also inherits the practice of games played by mail inaugurated by Diplomacy ((Calhamer 1959) and developed in various analog and digital forms. In Jean-Charles’s view, and as it was highlighted by Roxanne earlier, the specificity of Alice is Missing’s game proposition lies in the fact that it hijacks a means of communication (Internet chat) both from its normal framework and from its distanced vocation, by turning it into a means of physically playing together.↩︎
Gary Alan Fine distinguishes between the social layer of people, the game layer of players and the diegetic layer of characters. For Markus Montola, these three frames contain implicit rules that allow us to differentiate between different forms of role-playing: “t1) In tabletop role-playing the game world is defined predominantly in verbal communication. l1) In larp the game is superimposed on physical world, which is used as a foundation in defining the game world. v1) In virtual role-playing the game is superimposed on a computational virtual reality, which is used as a foundation in defining the game world” (Montola 2008, 24). From this perspective, Montola points out that role-playing on Internet chats is more a form of tabletop role-playing than virtual role-playing but can be integrated into a larp or virtual role-playing (ibid.). In the case of Alice is Missing, Jean-Charles noticed how the boundary between these three forms becomes extremely blurred and variable. As the player-characters are friends chatting over the Internet, the chat platform becomes in part a virtual representation of the fictional world, in part a chat integrated into a form of larp (with players “embodying” the position of the characters), and in part a medium for the verbal communication of tabletop role-playing. The remote play of Alice is Missing reinforces the similarity of the embodied situations, but the twists and turns of the game (which involves the characters exploring different locations) put the practice back on the side of tabletop role-playing. As underlined by Jean-Charles, this dynamic of superimposing and interchanging frames and forms encourages the disarticulation of the magic circle’s boundaries and bleed. He underlined that the spatial co-presence of the players, on the other hand, maintains the use of the chat room as a game convention and allows players to monitor their emotional states. As the game does not use a game master (GM) to referee play, such a strengthening of the frames seems all the more important, especially for new players.↩︎
[1.5] JCR: That’s how the game presents itself: “A Silent Role-Playing Game.”7 It states that “excluding the game setup, it is played live without verbal communication” (Starke 2020, 8). While the game offers an online variant which is said to possibly “result in an even more unique, immersive experience” (Starke 2020, 45) – the playing context being closer to the fictional situation – I do think that the presence of the absence that you mention is paramount to the experience of the game. To me, the experience of being in the same room while developing the fiction in a virtual group chat is what created both a safe and intimate space of play, allowing for emotional intensity. Playing online wouldn’t have allowed us to have the same airlocks around the game through the setup and debriefing. Following Fine’s three-tiered frame model (1983),8 I feel that strengthening the primary and secondary frames of being together as players highlighted9 how intimacy, trust, and the alibi of the character are essential to playing with dark themes as they develop boundaries upon the magic circle to avoid bleed. We were dealing with some heavy stuff, playing often tense situations, and sometimes doubted our characters, but we were together in a fiction that we framed and developed conjointly.
Jean-Charles more specifically refers to Genesis Marie Downey’s description of the way in which external reality can integrate play (bleed-in) and vice versa (bleed-out). That author nevertheless points out that this permeability can be one of the reasons for engaging in role-playing as “a cathartic way of creative problem solving” (Downey 2015, 88), and that it can nevertheless be emotionally painful. Thus, the issue of emotional safety becomes paramount, and the various frames that can reinforce trust between players and the feeling of safety (isolation, selection of participants, reading body language, communication tools, etc.) desirable. In this case, our three authors were playing in a professional environment (the University of Montreal’s game lab), which they reappropriated for the gaming session: the lab was empty, the meeting tables became the card holders, the lights were dimmed, they made themselves comfortable in the armchairs destined for the video game stations… They needed to create a cocoon that would allow the emotions tied to the fiction to exist within a session between friends and colleagues.
Mirka Oinonen builds on Downey’s work to further develop the idea of the played character as an alibi for making oneself vulnerable and experimenting with attitudes and decisions that break with the persona embodied in everyday life (Oinonen 2020, 24–25). In the case of Alice is Missing, Kevser observed how access to physical persons introduces a distance between the player and his character: the character can be absolutely panicked and upset in the chatroom while the player is serenely seated in an armchair, and exchanges of glances or sketched smiles can play down an extremely tense virtual situation, and so on. Here, Jean-Charles wants to underline that the juxtaposition of physical presence and virtual communication not only makes the game more accessible by reducing the role-playing game’s theatricality, but also frees up the field of identity exploration by clearly separating the player’s domain from that of the character.↩︎
A concept often used to describe the collaborative building of a TRPG’s world and narrative (see Bowman 2010; Acharya and Wardrip-Fruin 2019; Katifori et al. 2022; Hilton 2023).↩︎
[1.6] RC: It’s really interesting that you mention the setup and debriefing as crucial components that help encompass the game experience itself because this process of co-creation10 was absolutely fundamental to getting comfortable enough to truly participate in the creative process. As a player who is accustomed to the GM/player dynamic, in which there definitely is a component of active creation on the part of the player, but where the ownership of the world generally belongs to the GM, I found the setup process very interesting. It helped me get eased into the idea that we were all collaboratively responsible for building this narrative together.
[1.7] Although the game gave us a few locations and key people to keep track of as potential suspects, we decided together what and who these elements were in our story. Whereas both Kevser and yourself were really leaning into the game’s prescribed setting, I was trying to add elements of life to this world our characters would have inhabited even before Alice went missing. I remember wanting the Lighthouse, a location that ended up not being very important in our game, to have been known as a common ghost-sighting site. I imagined it being this place where teenagers went late at night to spook each other. I think the fact that you, Jean-Charles, presented yourself as a facilitator rather than a mastermind with all the answers to the riddle of our friend’s disappearance really allowed me to feel comfortable adding this overall unimportant detail that, to me anyway, made our little town feel more alive.
[2.1] JCR: In my experience, it was a beginner-friendly role. I’ve tried various formulas, from traditional [Call of Cthulhu; Petersen and Willis (1981), and others] to more participative narration of Powered by the Apocalypse games (Baker and Baker 2016), and the facilitator position offered by Alice is Missing allowed me both to follow a detailed exposition of the rules I was to read to you and to become an active player equal to you rather than having the responsibility of the rules and the story.
Emotional safety tools are designed to cover all three phases of the game: upstream, during the game and downstream. In addition to the formalized tools integrated into the game, Alice is Missing includes in its very structure the principles of co-creation (favoring the playful social contract and the concordance of the creative aim), of safe zones (with the possibility of isolating oneself from the general chat to talk in duet or to use virtual tools to correct the text), and of gradual exit from the game (with a narrative closing made in common and a moment of post-game discussion).↩︎
[2.2] My first task was to give you a content warning and present the three safety tools11 used here. The “X-card” (Stavropoulos 2013) would allow anyone to ask for content to be removed; the open door policy stated I should remind you that you were free to leave the game at any moment and that “people are more important than the game” (Starke 2020, 10); and the Lines and Veils system (Edwards 2003) allowed you to put a line on content you didn’t wish to see in the game and a veil on content you wished to be only vaguely mentioned. Alice is Missing suggested veils on gore and violence, sexual non-consent, and victim blaming, but other veils were added. I wonder if this process would have been more comfortable if it had been anonymized. I once used a “suggestion box” in which every player could secretly ask for a line and/or a veil, but here, you had to ask for it out loud…
[2.3] From there, we each chose a character archetype and developed them, sharing backgrounds but keeping a secret for later. As the facilitator, I had to play Charlie Barnes, the one who moved away, as they are the one through whom the story is launched.
[2.4] Then, the decks of locations and suspects cards gave us a starting point to flesh out the town and people of Silent Falls. What did you think of these?
[2.5] RC: I think the idea of a suggestion box would have been great. I felt comfortable discussing what I wanted to be veiled in addition to what was suggested because both of you are my friends, but I can imagine that had the game been played in another context, such as during a convention or an event at a local game store open to a wide range of people, it might have been harder to discuss these things. That would definitely be an improvement with regard to the emotional accessibility of the game.
On this point, Kevser further explained to me how, just like silence, lines and veils seem paradoxical in the way they work. She pointed out the way they also oscillate between presence and absence, visibility and disappearance, at one time being a subject of conversation and most other times being silenced or avoided, made to be acknowledged at one point but then to be actively forgotten during the rest of the game. In her perspective, silence and the lines-and-veils system therefore appear to be liminal mechanics: they exist in the liminal spaces of the game, i.e. the room where the bodies of the players are at play (silence), the prologue and epilogue (lines and veils). Thus, they always remain outside, on the periphery and margins of the textual space where the story takes place. They effectively allow, shape and change different modes of accessibility and safety to the game space according to their variable configurations.↩︎
[2.6] KG: I agree. I felt comfortable enough to voice out my “line,” but I honestly debated whether I should just keep it to myself the whole time. So, psychologically, I still had to overcome an obstacle to be able to tell you. The “line and veils” are a wonderful mechanic to have but it would definitely benefit from anonymity. My line was not such a big deal to share, but since it was related to personal trauma – and I imagine lines and veils usually must be because of their purpose – I felt like I revealed something of myself that still remains sensitive. Interestingly, lines and veils constitute a specific detail of the game, meant to be forgotten.12 As we touched upon earlier, I believe Alice is Missing is a game that lies within the unsaid. In this specific case, this is an un-said, i.e., we actually named it (something was said) and written out of our game (to then become an unsaid, we erased what was said)! Even more fascinating! Nonetheless, if the line had been anonymous, if it had not been “my” line, unrelated to me under the veil of anonymity, just addressing it would no longer have constituted such a vulnerable act.
[2.7] RC: Exactly! Ultimately, I think it was expected that we would experience uncomfortable emotions during gameplay because of the game’s main subject matter. That being said, the lines-and-veils tool allowed us to define what was too much. And that, however imperfectly it might be implemented, is already a wonderful accessibility resource, in my opinion.
[2.8] Insofar as the decks are concerned, I thought they were an interesting tool both to get us started on the creation of our little town, but also as a way to propel the story forward during our session. From a strictly mechanical point of view, the cards themselves were useful to keep track of the different moving parts of the story that we aren’t necessarily super familiar with, as well as to move the narrative forward during the actual game itself. This, I feel, might make the game more approachable to newer players or even players with a learning disability (like me! I have a very bad working memory!). I think they are a crucial part of the game: we only have a very short amount of time to get to know the town before we jump into the game, and the cards give us something to anchor ourselves. I do wonder if the game would benefit from leaving a bit more freedom to the players in creating elements of the town’s mystery, on the other hand.
[2.9] KG: Unlike traditional TRPGs, this game did not require creating our characters from scratch or for the GM to prepare any stories and locations. It gave us a comfortable recognizable frame of reference with the location, a small town in California, reminiscent of the small towns we might have seen in most American TV shows. We could choose location cards and start imagining together the stories related to those places. The game also provided familiar character dynamics centered around the missing character, Alice. The familiarity of such a dynamic only required creative additions to the budding story instead of hours of lore creation and character development, hence more accessible to new players who can be overwhelmed by character creation and feel not knowledgeable enough to understand the lore. Depending on the cards we chose, we could imagine different friendships and rivalries. Ours were pretty straightforward, with me (Dakota) being Alice’s best friend, Roxanne (Eva) being a classmate with a secret crush on Alice, and Jean-Charles (Charlie) being a returning classmate. The one-on-one conversations we had created a sub-text that framed and reframed our main three-way conversation and added new lenses from which to view and review our relationships, creating a second, third, fourth, and so on, layer of textual space where rumors and conspiracies naturally emerged. These could only slip between the cracks of our words and thrive within the gaps we created in our respective individual narratives through our conversations. This goes back to our theory about the prevalence of narrative gaps in this specific game.
[3.1] JCR: I was a bit ambivalent about the cards. I think it was important to have starting points to base and coordinate our contributions, but I felt that they tended to push us toward certain tropes. For instance, to me, “The Dripping Dagger nightclub” pointed us toward a shady club where teenagers could spend the night without being carded, and I couldn’t imagine “Mr. Halvert, the history teacher” other than as a professor having inappropriate relationships with his students. I’ve watched some actual plays to see if it was only me, but they mostly corroborated these visions. That leads me to question the game’s setting. There is a story that is to be told here, one of teenage friendship, coming of age, trust, mourning, etc., and the game states that its “theme and tone is heavily inspired by the video games Life is Strange [Don’t Nod Entertainment 2015], Gone Home [Gaynor 2013], and Oxenfree [Hines and Krankel 2016]” (Starke 2020, 47). I wonder, however, if the use of the small American town with its “creeper,” its “bully,” its “popular kid” was essential to that story… to me, it tended to reconduct some archetypes and cultural dominations (see Trammell 2018).13 For instance, Life is Strange is a French game, and the creators stated that they had no choice but to rely on an American setting to reach an audience because an unsexualized female protagonist was already considered risky by the editors (Dittmar 2015). Plus, while the game started with the disappearance of a young girl, I think we can agree that the story it told was about something else completely, and the same goes for Gone Home…
In this text, Aaron Trammell outlines the issues of representation and stereotyping, pointing out that the former often implies the latter and that, insofar as the stereotype is both conscious and unconscious, it is often the case that an individual performs one stereotype in order to avoid another. On this point, Trammel draws on the work of Stuart Hall, asserting that “the only way to combat a stereotype is to dissolve it by embracing and producing diverse representations in the media” (Trammell 2018, 441). Based on this observation, Jean-Charles wanted to question the relevance of reconducting a narrative setting that is already culturally hegemonic, while emphasizing that this setting is used to favor the reception of the ludic system and crafted to integrate a diversity of identities. He underlined the relevance of Trammell’s conclusive opening concerning “the inescapable kernel of discrimination and stereotyping” (Trammell 2018, 445): the aim is not to provide a definitive answer, but to offer a contribution to the discussion of tabletop role-playing’s capacities for representation and identity experimentation.↩︎
[3.2] So, I think I would have liked ways to tailor the premise of the game a bit more to avoid the “women in refrigerators” trope (Simone 1999) or to have other kinds of settings. It felt to me that I was playing one of the TV series that shaped my teenage years rather than being able to see a part of my reality represented in the game, and I’m part of one of the most privileged and represented social groups, so I’m not sure how much a more minoritized person can put into this setting!
[3.3] RC: That’s really interesting, because I feel like I picked up on that instinctively, and that might be why I contributed things that willingly went against the tropes, or that made it so we had other things to explore – like my haunted lighthouse which, if I remembered correctly, also served as a local art gallery!
[3.4] KG: Faced with a stereotypical story, I defaulted to stereotypical imaginings and creation. The only thing I chose to implement to have a minute part of my personality reflected in my character was an alternative taste in music. I chose to conform to the stereotypical American story presented to us by playing the goth-girl best friend. I did not think of expressing any other “alternativeness,” especially not my ethnicity, or other parts of my identity, not to disturb the stereotype. Now that I think about it, it did not even occur to me to change the script for it to accommodate my own identity. Rather, I accommodated the game. Erasing my identity as a minority to conform to the norm is still very much engrained in me. It is all the more interesting to see how we all dealt with these tropes that framed and dictated our approach to the game!
[3.5] JCR: Like you, I think I accommodated the game while trying to circumvent the most obvious or unpleasant tropes, not instinctively but because I feared that the system wouldn’t support a ghost story or something like that, and I wanted the game to work and for us to have a good time. I wonder if our group dynamic involuntarily limited Roxanne’s contributions and, in a way, reproduced on a micro level that kind of cultural domination… I think we can see that our group as a whole reinforced representations that we inherited from cultural habits but that aren’t an expression of ourselves – or if they are, it is, as you said, an internalized and adopted part. In the end, our session appears very consensual regarding its themes, and what I ponder is: had we decided to include ethnic or religious diversity, would it have been possible to do so while remaining coherent with the setting, or would we have had to choose between one of the two and either reenact difficult situations or erase some aspects of a small American town?
[3.6] RC: I certainly felt a bit limited by the type of narrative that I would be able to weave from all of this, but at the same time, I think it’s something we all agreed to when we decided to play this specific game, is it not? A story about the disappearance of a teenage girl in a small American town will lend itself to certain narrative possibilities that are limited by its scope and context. We can play with the boundaries of that, stretch some things, but would we be playing Alice is Missing if we tried to go beyond all the stereotypes suggested by the setting?
[3.7] That being said, I think the game tries to be inclusive – there are several posters available with several different versions of Alice (all available on the game’s website), we are explicitly asked to state our pronouns, etc. It that sense, even though it encourages certain stereotypical story archetypes, which are definitely in line with the setting of the game, there is some leeway that allows for the players to feel comfortable.
On this subject, Faber and Mayer explained that “they [Archetypes] are story characters– prototypes of culturally important figures– that are learned and recognized implicitly, and whose historical and personal significance evoke emotional reactions” (Faber and Mayer 2009, 310).↩︎
[3.8] KG: One could argue that stereotypes or archetypes are there to be recognizable by everyone.14 They can be a useful way to make anyone feel familiar and comfortable with the story. There is nothing subversive about stereotypes, and to that extent, I wonder how much it is the player’s responsibility to subvert the game. It was the first time I played this game, so I did not go into it with the idea of “breaking the rules” or “rewriting the game”. I don’t think Alice is Missing is necessarily made to go beyond archetypical American narratives.
[3.9] JCR: The game states that it is a one-shot and that we are not supposed to play the game again with the same people. To me, it might be one of its more beautiful aspects as I think it gives the fiction we created the nostalgic aura of people and moments that will only live in our memories. Yet, because of their archetypal aspect, they’re also a bit disappointing, as if they couldn’t manage to be more than the usual people you may meet in a small town like this. In a way, it’s part of the aesthetics of the genre and, as you said, it does help with the accessibility of the game for new players. What did you think about the early game?
[3.10] KG: The game session itself had me feeling anxious, nervous and excited. I had to manage being funny to prevent our group from going into panic, role-playing instructions given to me by the Drive Card while at the same time taking Alice’s disappearance very seriously, me playing her best friend. I don’t think I succeeded in that aspect at all because it led Roxanne and Jean-Charles’ characters to be suspicious of mine, which made the game a bit more fun rather than just serious and heavy. In the very last seconds of the countdown, Eva (Roxanne’s character) went completely missing after having found Alice’s whereabouts and kidnappers. It was truly terrifying not having her respond to our messages! Thus, our game ended on a cliffhanger, which surprised me somehow because I had expected a more definite and clearer outcome. We then proceeded to do a little epilogue talk where we discussed the ending, tied a few loose ends, and addressed plot holes, which once again comes back to our gap argument. Alice’s disappearance then only appears as a pretext and a catalyst to our mending of narrative gaps. It is like a detective game at its core but about social relationships, especially players’ interpersonal performances. The whole game, with that genre of games/fiction in mind, urges the players to think about what is missing, making our argument about the unsaid, silences, and gaps even more convincing. So overall, I see Alice is Missing as a game about what is missing,” and Alice is just the name given to our quest to create meaning, a means to creatively and safely explore role-playing itself out of a blank yet controlled space.
[3.11] JCR: I see it as coming-of-age conventions: like in Tales From the Loop (Hintze and Stålenhag 2017), the adults are oblivious to what’s going on, and teens must fend for themselves. There was a strange transition from the social dynamic of a group of friends chatting about the last party and the stakes of the disappearance. In a way, we were, as players, trying to make sense of the situation like our characters were trying to understand what they should do. The tension thickened as the timed soundtrack progressed and I’m still moved by the last messages of the group chat when we were trying to reach Eva (see Figure 1). In the end, we tied the loose ends as the game recommended and had our debriefing: we had to look back on these events and organize them just like we would remember times spent with people we were never to see again.
| 🌜eva🌛 between storms ⛈ | |
| - At the boulder | |
| - Can’t run anymore | |
| 🖤 Dee 🖤 (Dakota) | |
| - Hide ⛈ | |
| 🌜eva🌛 between storms | |
| - She’s gonna find me | |
| Charlie | |
| - Can’t see her. Too much snow. | |
| 🌜eva🌛 between storms ⛈ | |
| - oh god | |
| - Charlie the flash drive | |
| - In my pocket | |
| - If she finds me | |
| Charlie | |
| - I’ll find you, don’t worry | |
| 🌜eva🌛 between storms ⛈ | |
| - o | |
| 🖤 Dee 🖤 (Dakota) | |
| - Eva… | |
| Charlie | |
| - I see the trail | |
| - Eva where are you? Can’t see the boulder | |
| - Eva? | |
| - Eva answer | |
| - Eva answer pls | |
| 🖤 Dee 🖤 (Dakota) | |
| - Eva? | |
| - Hope she’s just hiding | |
| - Eva… ? | |
Fig. 1: Last chat at the end of the game.
[3.12] RC: Personally, as I am more familiar with Dungeons & Dragons (Gygax and Arneson 1974), I had a hard time starting the game: I kept waiting for you to send us in a specific direction for the first 15 minutes or so. When I realized this wasn’t going to happen, that’s when the true role-playing started. I realized my role in this session was not to react to what was given to me but to truly actively participate in creating our story. To that effect, the event cards are a useful tool to help propel the narrative forward: they must be read at specific times, and help give the players a general direction, weaving together the locations and characters that were fleshed out during setup, while also allowing the players to be creative.
[3.13] My experience was overall very positive, and I think the space and the music had a lot to do with it, but I have a general feeling about the game that I would like to discuss with you: although the mechanics are very simple and accessible, I wonder if this is a game for first-time role-players. Even if I am familiar with role-playing, I had a hard time getting started. I wonder if this is linked to my own experiences with the GM/player dynamic, or if this could be a barrier for non-players. At the beginning, I think we kind of waddled about, not knowing what to do for a bit. And that’s okay! It’s part of what made our journey lovely. But this absence of a goal, which was not entirely remedied by the event cards, made this, at least for me, a particularly hard game to role-play. I’m trying to imagine someone entirely new to the concept of role-playing trying to get into such a game and, unless they are a writer or someone who works in a very creative field, I can see that it would be quite daunting to just start… writing. Creating something out of barely anything. That is what, in my opinion, makes the game both accessible and inaccessible: plenty of its core features are fundamentally focused on accessibility, but playing the game itself isn’t necessarily accessible.
[3.14] The ending you mentioned was absolutely gut-wrenching, especially since I was on the receiving end of your messages. The card I got at the 10-minute mark was to stop answering all messages at the 2-minute mark. It made it so I was able to see all of your worried messages but couldn’t answer. This ended the game on a very emotional note which truly was the apotheosis of our experience. This grand finale was in line with the tone that had been set up both by the setting and our preparations and play session, and it truly made us feel like something happened, something out of our control, that we did not manifest into existence through our words. If anything, I wish the event cards created more of those moments throughout the game. Not necessarily as powerful or intense, but it could have given us more meaningful trajectories we could follow.
[3.15] JCR: I see what you mean, and I think it’s part of the expected experience. The game states, “It’s okay to have moments where nothing happens. Silence can and will occur during the game. When the group chat goes quiet, consider initiating private conversations with other characters” (Starke 2020, 19). It might be speculative, but I’d say it relies on what Ron Edwards and Vincent Baker call the “fruitful void” (RPG Museum 2020): something that isn’t in the rules per se but appears between them. It connects with Kevser’s idea of silence and absence, and I see it as a way to experience the difficulties of grasping power and responsibility within the coming-of-age genre. Those first hesitations contrasted with the spiral of events that swept us toward that ending and, to me, the debriefing was essential. We played a quite “safe” narrative and didn’t use much of the debrief but the little time we took felt important to have some closure. On that note, as your facilitator I must inform you that we must conclude this article quite soon… As the game states: “When the timer goes off, players may send one last in-character text message” (Starke 2020, 22). As far as potential new players are concerned, I’d like to offer nuance: I understand that the creative responsibility and emotional charge of the themes can be worrying, but to me the gameplay guidance and simplicity of the system make Alice is Missing a very accessible game for people unfamiliar with role-playing or not used to playing games at all. I wouldn’t recommend it to just anyone, but for someone who wants to explore these aspects of role-playing, the design is very welcoming. That being said, do you have a few last things you’d like to add?
Role-play is demanding in terms of engagement, an opinion Kevser expressed as well. Furthermore, she noted how not being able to process a play experience might leave a lasting emotional aftereffect on the player and compromise the safety apparatus deployed during game sessions but then neglected after the game. On that subject, it could be interesting to take into account the existence of a post-game depression (Klimczyk 2023) within TRPGs and the possibility to mitigate it through the practice of debriefing/de-rolling (Atwater 2016; Crookall 2014), most often found in larp as a means to handle bleed-out (Leonard and Thurman 2018).↩︎
[3.16] KG: I’d like to say that the fact that we can never go back to the game we played is not truly specific to this game but, to me, is reminiscent of every role-playing game I have played. Every time games end, and groups can no longer come together in the same way, it carries that same kind of sadness, melancholy, or even grief that I also felt at the end of our game.15 However, I would have to admit that this sadness was not as meaningful or intense as the ones I have felt in my other role-playing games since I only had 90 minutes in this one to get accustomed to, play with, and say goodbye to my character, Dakota Travis. Therefore, I did not have the same attachment to her as a role-player as I have or had to others. How was it for you?
[3.17] RC: The short and very ephemeral experience that was Alice is Missing has been, even with the flaws we’ve highlighted, a very memorable one for me. Two things that stick out to me were the atmosphere and the silences, as we’ve mentioned a few times. It’s in these moments in-between messages, when all we had were the soundtrack and the sparse clacking of keyboards, that I feel we got the most meaningful parts of our playthrough: we were building a story together. I don’t mean to be emotional, but I’m glad I got to experience it with both of you, and it makes me wonder how such a game would be playable in other contexts or even with strangers. I felt like it required at least some vulnerability (Downey 2015; Weigel and Rudnick 2023): being comfortable with these “moments where nothing happens” doesn’t necessarily come easy to a lot of people, and being with trusted friends helped me not only to accept them but to value them as impactful role-play moments. I think the combination of the system and the setting opens the door to some potentially difficult narratives – which was not our case, as you highlighted Jean-Charles, but I imagine I could very easily be quite unsettling to some players. As such, I wonder how comfortable I would be playing this with people I am not so familiar and at ease with, and if the debriefing period would be enough to truly make the experience emotionally accessible.