Hello! I’ve been playing Roller Drama over the last week or so. It’s not a long game, I gather, but I’m taking it slow, because it feels, in its own way, like it’s a whole world I am being dunked in, and I want to make the most of it, and to live it as fully as I can.
It’s a wonderfully strange thing. In Roller Drama you play as a coach to a roller derby team. You play the matches – which are brilliant and tactical and exhausting, and I have yet to finish one without someone on the team dropping on the track out of sheer knackerdness – and in between you knock around the house you all live in together, solving surreal little puzzles and talking to a ghost who looks a bit like Shakespeare. There’s a cat involved too, who, physics fans will be glad to hear, may or may not be dead. It’s hard to tell.
It’s rare for a game with this many pieces to fully click, I think. But Roller Drama is clicking for me. And that’s because I like the hectic, thoughtful spin on a sport I can barely comprehend, and also because this game, I think, is secretly something very coherent and very welcome. It’s secretly an absolutely stellar houseshare simulation.
Testify. It’s not just that you and your team live in this house together. It’s that the game is alive to the awkwardness and endless nuance of living in a house with a lot of other people. I am the middle of five children myself, and I’ve also houseshared a lot over the years, and I love and recognise loads of the little things about this game.
I love the hesitancy I feel when initiating a conversation – the way I try to get as many clues as I can to the state of mind of the person I might be about to talk to. I love sneaking around the hallways trying not to encounter anyone else on my way to a shared room. I love the strange moments of opportunity where the world seems to open up as you meet someone you weren’t expecting to outside or in the kitchen and you have a moment. It’s magic.
Most of all I love the doors. Games are great at doors, aren’t they? And Roller Drama’s may be amongst my favourite yet. On one of the game’s weird quests, I’ll find myself going to chat to someone – say Anne, on the top floor. I’ll hover outside the door and suddenly all these options! Do I want to go straight in? Knock? Do I want to secretly listen for a second just to make sure I’m choosing a good moment? I have not encountered these things in a game before – the awkward transition spaces that emerge when you’re living with people that you’re still getting to know.
I’m reading The Old Ways by Robert MacFarlane at the moment, a page or two here in between a few minutes with Roller Drama, and some interesting synergies crop up. On the bus this afternoon I was reading MacFarlane’s thoughts about the need for a term for transition spaces – spaces where one moves from a “known” landscape into something else, “somewhere we feel and think significantly differently.” This is the houseshare trip into a housemate’s room, isn’t it? Filled with fascination and a slight social anxiety. What will I see? Will I accidentally make an idiot of myself? Should I just knock all this sociability on the head and just make a sandwich? All of this stuff in a lovely, oddball videogame – and it plays a mean game of Roller Derby too.
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