Body, Brain, and Beat Saber
Am I a real writer, or is that just the rhythm games talking?
In this issue of Story Games, the book I’m talking about is my own. I get honest about novel writing, and explore why my creative process feels connected right now with Beat Saber, a VR game that originally released in 2019. Read on to learn why it’s all about the body—and about using that body to work on bringing a queer novel into being.
The Novel That Is the Body
I’ve been writing a novel for the last ten years.
The first seven of those years were dedicated to a book I wrestled with during and after graduate school, relentlessly taking my work through everything you must learn in order to tell a novel-length story of merit. The remaining three years have been spent on a new book, the one I began writing after freeing myself from the first one—my MFA thesis—by putting it in a drawer.
Over these ten years, I’ve become accustomed to living in the state of writing a novel. Whether I added word count to the manuscript or not, I thought about my first book, and then my second book, every single day. The plot. The characters. The texture and atmosphere of the emotional world. When and how I was going to accomplish the writing. Who I was writing for.
But now some things are shifting for me. I just completed a second full draft of my newer manuscript, the one I worked on during Covid-19. It’s sitting in the hands of collaborators now, and I’m getting the sense that I might actually publish this book, instead of putting it in a drawer.
You would think my impression of potential success for this manuscript would arrive with a sense of freedom, happiness, possibility. And it hasn’t been the opposite of that, exactly. What’s occurring is something else, a phenomenon I’m finding very strange. For some reason, I feel like my novel is a piece of my body, and that piece is now in the process of being removed.
It’s strange to think a process as abstract as novel-writing could be this somatic. But maybe it does make sense. My book is about travel, coming-of-age, trans self-integration, and queer sex. It’s this world of memory and possibility that, for three pandemic years, I lived in. I guess it makes sense that it also lived in me.
For the last month, I’ve been trying to figure out who I will be when this piece of my body is finally gone. Should I replace it with a new novel? Why does being successful make me feel like something is going wrong?
Beat Saber
Meanwhile, I’ve been playing Beat Saber on a hand-me-down Meta Quest 2 VR headset I got from my dad. After experimenting with VR gaming for a while, he’d decided it wasn’t his genre, and asked me if I wanted the headset. I said yes. I wanted to play Beat Saber!
A VR rhythm game originally released in 2019, Beat Saber is one of a limited cluster of titles that make VR games feel like more than just a party trick. Similar to Dance Dance Revolution, Beat Saber tasks you with hitting notes in accordance to pounding techno music.
In the game’s world, the VR controllers appear as the handles of light sabers, and you use their blades to chop at the note-blocks rushing toward you. When you slash a note-block on beat, in the direction of its internal glowing arrow, the controller in your hand vibrates satisfyingly to communicate that you’re doing it right.
I was a Dance Dance Revolution junkie during college, and Beat Saber has been on my radar since it first came out. What I like about these games is how your whole body gets involved. It’s a way to play a video game that involves sensation beyond what you’re doing with your hands.
I’ve never really cared about games being immersive. In fact, I delight in games that violate the fourth wall,or the rules of the magic circle. But there is one exception: I love being immersed in music, my thinking brain annihilated by the urgency of seeing, parsing, acting on rhythm game notes. There’s something freeing about the consuming panic of focusing on so much at once. No space for regretting the past or anticipating the future or imagining how ridiculous you look to your partner, sitting behind you, waiting their turn on the Meta Quest 2.
A Problem My Entire Body Works On
I’ve spent most of my career as an artist trying to reconcile my desire to write emotional literary novels with the sensation-hungry body that desire lives in.
I thought about this when nonbinary poet Lillian-Yvonne Bertram joined us on Queers at the End of the World, the podcast by Nino McQuown that I co-hosted for the last two years, and remain a collaborator on as the series continues into its third season.
Bertram was on Queers at the End of the World primarily to discuss their book of algorithmic poetry, Travesty Generator. It’s a brilliant collection that explores Blackness and anti-Black violence, and systems—how those systems speak, who those systems speak about (or don’t). It resonates deeply with the part of me who likes games that acknowledge, or break, their own rules.
Toward the end of the interview, we touched on Bertram’s life outside of writing. They’re an ice climber, snowboarder, and skier, so Nino and I were curious about how this adventurous side to Bertram’s life interacted with their creative practice. Their response to this question was beautiful, taking us through family life, being Black in the whitewashed world of winter sports, and the magnetism of extreme things.
Here’s what Bertram said that resonated with me the most:
Coding is a difficult thing for me to do . . . so I feel like I have to balance it out with actually being able to move my body from one place to another in a way that’s also difficult, but where that difficulty is something I can physically work through and achieve. I need to be able to feel difficulty. I need to be able to choose a kind of problem that my entire body works on.
The notion of using your entire body to work on problems makes incredible amounts of sense. I think I just experience that differently from Bertram, tending clownishly toward Beat Saber in my living room instead of clear mountain air.
A problem I’ve dealt with throughout my adult life is deciding what to wear—how to make this body seen amid disorienting gender norms and trans feelings. Here’s me working on that problem in my writing, an excerpt from my novel in which young protagonist Nick tries to get dressed for a party with her teacher colleagues:
This scene is based on countless similar moments in my own life, from graduate school to early days in New York. (Before that, I was a “tomboy” who worked in restaurants and on a farm.) Recently, I relived one of these fraught getting-dressed moments: my partner Pat and I attended the One Story Literary Debutante Ball for the first time since the pandemic.
The Debutante Ball is a fundraiser for One Story, a literary publication I’ve loved for years, and had the privilege of reading submissions for when I first moved to New York City. As a submission-reader, I was invited to the ball in 2017, and I remember passing through the same iteration of feeling—anticipated humiliation, desire to please, disorientation—as my protagonist Nick. Though my blazer didn’t have elbow patches, it was brown and gray. Underneath, I wore a thrift store dress. I hoped I’d meet someone who could help me finish writing my book.
The 2023 Debutante Ball was as glorious as the first one I went to. Debut authors appeared on stage to be announced as “debutantes,” there were free books, lights twinkled. The possibilities and problems of literature hung, palpable, in the air. I stood, eating cookies, wearing an excellent blue knit blazer I’d bought online from a modern gender-neutral brand. Underneath I sported a button-down and black jeans, plus some Doc Martens inspired by a look I saw queer comedian Mae Martin wearing once on Instagram.
For my novel’s protagonist, I had written this outcome, allowing him at twenty two to accomplish what I only did many years later:
In this scene, Nick is preparing to move away, and considering what can be left behind in that kind of transition. In my scene, I’m home in New York City, and wearing the things I’ve chosen to bring with me. The literary debutante ceremony is ending, and the crowd is applauding these authors whose books have also left their bodies, and made their way into the world.
The DJ is cueing the music. It’s time to dance.
The space where the Debutante Ball is held, Roulette in Brooklyn, is a wide room with a stage at front, and the dancing is happening up there, in front of the DJ. Some of the dancers are featured speakers from earlier—distinguished One Story alum Tania James is in the mix, printed-out speech shoved into one pocket. I scale the front of the stage in a single jump, not bothering to look around for stairs.
Let’s get real for a second. Playing rhythm games your whole adult life doesn’t make you a great dancer. In fact, it most definitely turns you into a kind of dance floor clown. You feel a deep relationship with the music, a history, and yet your body has practiced something quite different than what everyone’s doing here, shaking and stepping and dipping to the song.
But you get out there. Or at least, I did. You get out there because you can, or you want to, or because whatever was preventing you is now gone. The grief of that loss, the gap it left, feels unbearable. Into it flows a beat.
Get Dressed for the Ball
It will surprise no one that my B-side project for the past two years has been a print tabletop roleplaying game of costumes and performance called Ball of the Wild.
In Ball of the Wild, players create animals who dress up as other animals. The game consists of narrating the performances you put on to impress Mother Nature! I wrote this game to create a roleplaying space about experiencing all the magic and chaos of dress-up & dancing without dysphoric anxiety.
This month, I’ve been working with my collaborators at Scryptid Games to produce a second print run of Ball of the Wild. After fulfilling the initial Kickstarter run, I learned a ton about how to make beautiful print objects. I was never not excited about publishing this game, but now I’m feeling even more joy about its future.
Maybe that future includes you? The Ball of the Wild print zine can be ordered from my website, and a PDF version is available on Scryptid Games’ itch.io page. Plus, Ball of the Wild was recently featured on the Gen Con TV show, Sarah’s Table! Check out a group of talented streamers performing the full game.