Fan Club “Blog” #21: Shocktober Fest

I celebrated my birthday this week! I am - I think - 400 years old

Let's not linger on such unpleasantness.

I want to tell you about how I celebrated, which was dragging four of my closest friends (all of whom are actually players in my TTRPGs!) to Shocktober Fest. It's Europe's largest haunted house park, and it takes place every year, right outside my city.

The subject of this blog post is ambitious. I want to try and explain how I don't actually see the distinction between tabletop role-playing and haunted houses, and how they're both just tentacles of my octopus-like interest in play.

But I am also hungover, and I have several bruises on my hips and elbows from where I collided with furniture while running away from ghouls. It is not a state in which I'd run for a bus, let alone chase after a high-minded theory on the nature of role-playing.

I may not succeed; I may fail you

Fortunately, I am a professional. I know some tricks. To get me (us) through this challenging time I am sucking on a lollipop like a car crash victim honking on a penthrox whistle, and I have put on some music that helps me to laugh by contrasting my seedy hangover with shiny corporate brightness.

Let's see what I've got in the tank

So basically, my whole career got healthier when I chose to try and stop perceiving different genres of games. I think they are a fake idea. I didn't change anything about how I review games when I went from being a video game critic to a board game critic, or from a board game critic to a TTRPG critic. It's all just the same thing.

In the same way, in recent years I've been trying to psychically dissolve the walls we put up around what a "role-playing game" is, because I don't think they're helping us to grow as an artform. You learn way more when you look outside of your bubble.

You can see this if you look at lots of my work for People Make Games: Governments playing at wars, Californian non-gamers playing that they're in Mad Max, Second Life users playing at being sex workers, Chinese gamers re-inventing role-playing from the ground up, and immersive theatre people building a starship simulator.

Then there was my work for the Blaseball developers as the game's official commentator.

If you missed Blaseball while it was running, it was a fictional baseball league created during the pandemic where a characterful and buggy virtual simulator spat out the results of imaginary baseball matches. For the developers and the community, this sort of started as a satire of baseball, but it quickly stopped being an ironic engagement with the traditions of sports fandom and soon became exactly what sports fandom is- an agreement you make to step into a magic circle by deciding to care about a sports team.

Why do you support the Baltimore Crabs? There's no good reason! It's all totally arbitrary! But once you've made the decision to give a fuck, the magic circle is instantaneously so wide and rich and enchanting and the rewards (excitement, community, distraction, surprise, memes, in-jokes) feel limitless.

So, yeah. I'm not arguing that "sport is role-playing", exactly, but... well, actually, I guess that is what I'm arguing.

Which is how we get to Shocktober Fest. Because while gamers were pretty quick to realise that Blaseball or escape rooms are part of our culture, we have been waaaay slower at realising that the same is true of haunted houses.

If you're into videogames, you can see haunted houses through the lens of level design. The design discipline involves environmental storytelling, moments of light and shade (texturally and also literally), moments of tension and release, you want to set up expectations and subvert them, you want blind corners and chokepoints, you need crowd control, timing and a big finish.

But if you're into role-playing? Haunted houses are just LARPs.

(The entire modern immersive theatre industry is also just LARPing. Rob Morgan, my player that you all know from Play to Find Out, actually works in the immersive sector and gives talks at industry expos about how all of the show-runners there are limiting their skills by not playing TTRPGs for fun.)

Anyway, let me tell you a story from last night.

I've had some phenomenal nights at Shocktober Fest. I'll be a fan of that place until I die. The gameplay loop of "Slam a pint of cider, do a couple of haunts, slam a pint of cider" makes me feel like a giggling, buzzing bloodbag full of adrenaline and endorphines. So last night, I was really excited that I was taking four of my close friends who'd never been before. I could show them something that's close to my heart! What's better than that?

So you can imagine my slow-burn distress when, during the first haunt, I could see on their faces that they weren't experiencing a ton of fear or joy. They were picking through the haunt like cautious ghost-hunters. A little wary, a little nervous, just trying to understand what this was.

After this, I was worried my friends wouldn't "get it", and that the night might be a bit disappointing.

Fast-forward to later on in the night. Our group is literally falling over one another as we exit the sixth haunt (an American thanksgiving-themed nightmare called THE CARVING), our throats sore from screaming and our sides aching from laughing.

My friends were utterly unrecognisable from the inert bystanders they'd been before. Now they were so into it they'd just been shoving one another into the paths of chainsaws just to buy themselves a few seconds to flee! At this point in the evening, my friends were total converts.

"So what changed?" I asked them, lightheaded from relief and also from using my mouth to make noise instead of breathe.

"Oh," Tim answered, "We just had to get into character!"

He then helped me to finish a theory that I've been working on for as long as I've been going to Shocktober Fest.

With haunted houses, you get out of them what you put in. It's actually not enough to just give yourself over to the experience and let it happen to you. You have to play the role you've been assigned. Same as wrestling fans aren't just watching, they are shouting, they are playing the role of believing this is real, in a haunted house you don't just walk and watch, you have to act scared, and you have to show your friends you're scared (and while you're at it, grab them from behind and make them jump)! And so when performers leap out at you with a demonic expression and you scream - if you keep the keyfabe going - you're giving them permission to keep their part of the roleplay going too, and so with teamwork you elevate a small jumpscare into an extended moment of a haunter whispering creepy dialogue in your face and following you out of the room.

Which isn't to say that what we were doing last night is pretending we were scared. It's more beautiful than that. We were finding the fear inside us and blowing on it like an ember until it filled our whole bodies, until the fear isn't manufactured anymore. It's a psychic switcheroo.

And that's exactly what my players and I are trying to conjure at our pen and paper TTRPGs. You're coaxing your body and imagination into a shared hallucination. It's wild! But also, I feel like I'm only just now figuring out how deep this rabbit hole goes.

Pictured above: My friends after haunt #5 and cider #3.

If you want to go to Shocktober Fest, I'll round this post out with some practical advice.

• You want to get the Fast Pass tickets (6 per person is a good number). They're expensive, but I think dragging your ass to the middle of nowhere in Sussex and paying for normal tickets only to then try and save money by waiting in line is a false economy.

• If at all possible, go on a weeknight instead of a weekend, and earlier in October is better than later. Less crowds just means shorter wait times for haunts.

• When you arrive, ask the staff which the scariest and best haunts are. Not all haunts are created equal. The best ones are awe-inspiring. The worst ones are... extremely not great. Don't miss Coven of 13, Doom Town or Purgatory.

Goodness me. That was altogether too much writing and the beetles in my cider-soaked brain are getting restless. I'm going back to bed

Frightfully yours,

Quinns