Cantr II Discussion Forum

There is no other game I've ever seen that can evoke such emotion that a good player has to constantly remind themselves to separate from it. This is not just a game. It's an other life in an other world, often several other lives, with real relationships and real emotions that take conscious effort to separate from for some of us, and for some the separation may not be a real possibility. It isn't real only in that it cannot directly physically help or harm you. You can gain no physical resource from playing, nor can you lose any, only time and mental energies. But the brain doesn't get that difference. Nothing in our evolution or creation prepared us for such a distinction. For the brain, it is real life. And some of us rage quit when it gets unbearable because that's the only way we can separate.

It is a game though. I want some of my characters to die, and not just because I'm tired of them. I want them to die in a war over land, a battle with a greedy thief/pirate, an argument, even a petty argument, over some system or belief or idea or relationship. I want their death to mean something, and that they died because I lost. I can't always win (or can I?) because I'm probably not the best player by that long of a distance if at all (probably not at all). But then I lost. That's the end of the story. I'm at peace; I can lose gracefully.

Twice now I've been killed for nothing. NOTHING. Not greed, not an idea or belief, not a relationship, not a war, not an action. NOTHING. When I was in Cassandra's mission building, I saw no evidence of this alleged relationship that drove her crazy. For all I could tell, both her and my other murderer's players simply had nothing in the whole world better to do with themselves than kill helpless people. Yes this happens in real life. I hate that in real life too. Why would I want a repeat in a simulation that's supposed to be fun? For realism? I hate realism. I'm not everyone, I'm just saying I don't buy it.

This left me with a pent up rage I cannot spill anywhere without breaking the capitol rule. One that I tried repeatedly to just let go that isn't going anywhere. I don't feel like I lost a round of a game. I feel like I was bullied because someone had nothing better to do than be a bully. And I'm starting to think the reason I can't let it go is that these types keep getting praised for bringing excitement to the game. Really? REALLY?

As soon as I had a suitable in character reason to join Cassandra's chase, I did. I thought maybe I could get some of this excitement everyone loved so much. Here now was something to fight for, to die for, to play at and either win or lose and either way feel closure. Remarkably, I hated it. I hated every waking minute of it because I couldn't be there. I had to stay pent up inside to prevent the character I had in the chase acting out of character. I could not play, try as I might. My character could be there. It wasn't the same, it was frustrating, endlessly frustrating. I don't think I'd have even cared if I did get to kill Cassandra, because it wasn't, and couldn't be without a CRB, the same story. Cassandra, to the character chasing her, was some random stranger and threat to the island. It would feel like a win (or loss, had I died trying), and that story would conclude nicely, but I still had my pent up rage from the story that ended with my pointless death.

It was soothing to see how the discovery of my body was taken by those who knew me. I appreciated learning some of Cassandra's possible reasons on the forums. I thought at last I could let this go. But I cannot, because she keeps getting praise. This shouldn't effect me. It really shouldn't. But it does. It burns me. It makes me hate the whole game and game community that such a horribly ended story should be praised. I'm taking this too personally, I tell myself. I'm taking this too seriously. She wasn't a real bully, I tell myself; no real people were hurt at all. It feels like a lie. I want to blame the player. I shouldn't. I really shouldn't. And I wouldn't. But why must she be praised for playing a senseless bully-murderer? She wasn't, I remind myself with the information I was provided on the forums. She was hurt. Hurt people hurt people. She was messed up, and proceeded to mess up others. Okay? You were just a small part of a larger story, not a senseless death. Okay? No, you didn't win or lose, I answer my objections; you weren't involved in a game that round. Only a story. You can accept a small part can't you? I know it's not what we signed up for- we signed up for a game and not a small part in someone else's story, but you can accept such a role, can't you? Especially one that's over now? Okay?

It's soothing, but it's ridiculous. I shouldn't have too keep soothing myself. I should leave. But people want me here. Players, real people, want me here. I'm cursed with empathy; I can't leave while I'm wanted. This isn't just a game. This isn't just a game by a long shot. This is a community of writers and simulators working together on one world and one big story. It's a drama, a comedy, a tragedy, a getaway, a prison, a soap opera, a novel series, a second, third, up to sixteenth life depending. It's more than enough for the brain to recognize as real. And it hurts at least as often as it's fun.



I'm really starting to think I have to leave. I'm really starting to think this game is only healthy for people who can say "This is just a game" and feel like they're stating an obvious truth instead of a bold faced lie. Alas, curse my empathy,.. I'm still wanted here...

I think your friends and fellow players will understand you need time away from the game if it is affecting you emotionally this much.

You're right, it's not healthy to play when you get too emotionally attached, and other people will just have to deal with it until you come back.

Or you could do a holiday/vacation freeze for a little while. Keep your characters from dying and just take a good long break without worry.

I don't know, all I know if that you feel very very strongly about this, and you are fighting with yourself.. and it shouldn't be this hard. Being wanted here shouldn't keep you playing something that tears you up this much inside. You need to do what is best for yourself.

When I leave (when, not if) I'm not coming back.

Not unless someone convinces me I was seeing things wrong.

Well, I think I am having a hard time understanding what it is you are seeing things as in the first place.
You're hurt, but then you tell yourself why you shouldn't be.
You say you should leave, but then you say you are wanted and decide not to.
I'm not sure which parts you would see as wrong, because you seem to bounce back and forth between how you feel and what you think is right rationally.

I'll add that it seems like a lot of this anger comes from the praise, which you'd only see by viewing the forums.. so maybe it is not that game that really gets your goat, maybe it's the out of character opinions of others you play with?
Perhaps it's the forums you should be getting away from instead.

Human logic and emotion warring against each other within an individual is nothing new. That's why I bounce.

Perhaps I should leave the forums, but I'm pretty sure I'd leave the game shortly after that. The forums are what remind me I'm wanted by real people. With only the game as input, I'd soon convince myself only imaginary people wanted my imaginary people, and it would be real easy to hit the X and fill the survey thinking that; imaginary people aren't worth as much.

The part I would need to be convinced I'm wrong about in order to come back or stay longer than I otherwise would, is that I'm the only person still here (the rest have quit already) that sees this as more than a game and don't want pointless murders happening. I mean a significant portion; right now I only know of one, maybe two players besides myself like that. Cassandra's praise goes to show most of the community likes this kind of thing happening (or so it seems to me right now), which in turn implies this kind of thing will keep happening in greater numbers.
And of course there may be something I haven't thought of that could convince me as well.

I felt as you did on my first go around, took a year off, and came back with a new perspective and a much more effective barrier between worlds.

I disagree with you on a major point, however: Your character DID lose the game, and their death DID mean something. However, you're angry because you didn't know what the game was, and as such their death meant nothing to you.

I agree that that's simply not fair, and will even say it is unjust, that you were robbed of your hard-wrought story by an anonymous death. But Cantr never gives any guarantees of fairness or equity, and I believe it is the very elements that make Cantr unique and special that allow this. It is like light and dark; they are parts of the whole, inseparable.

It is a matter up putting up stronger walls and accepting unfairness as a necessary part of the Cantr experience. If you find you can't do that, perhaps you'd find free-form role-play more to your liking, where nothing can happen without consent.

I think a talk with the player of Cassandra would be very cathartic, however, if I played her, there's no way I'd come out and expose myself at this point.

This is my first go around, and being an avid RP player, I find myself immersing myself in the chars emotions and it gets pretty bad, I tend to take things a little too personally, In the end, i chalk it up to being a really good RP player, although it doesn't stop....which is frustrating. Sometimes i just want to go on a blood rage with one of my chars, and god knows they deserve to, but then again its like society. you have to control yourself in game just like you would out of game. I prefer to use it as a training tool.

Back when I started, there were people who would massacre whole towns just because they could, or make sweeps to get rid of all the sleepers in a town. But around the middle of 900's, something changed, maybe it was the implementation of the fighting skill, or tiredness, or both, that limited people's abilities of assaulting a whole town. It lead into people generally dragging people into locked locations before killing them, instead of the old open approach. I've heard that early in the game, (back before I started) there was even no dragging, so law breakers had to be lured to enter buildings so that they could be locked up.

Doug, you missed my point real point. Or rather, I muddied it too much; sorry. Logically, I know I'm wrong. I just have a harder time convincing my emotions to agree with me than I should have. Also, the community, by it's postings, doesn't seem to care whether there was a story to the deaths or not, so long as it resulted in a motivated chase.

I've tried free form role play. It always comes to an abrupt stop somewhere when players stop posting. If they start posting again months later, I'm not around by then to notice. In Cantr that results in the character falling asleep, but the world itself continues on. Ticks keep happening, and I can keep playing.

In any case, this is my first and only go around if my mind doesn't get changed. I've never returned to something for a second round before in my life. I either stick with something forever, or I move completely on.

I should also say I only learned I was wrong relatively recently, so maybe my emotions will catch up in time on that note, knowing that I did lose and that there was a story and so forth.

That doesn't say anything about my first murder before Cassandra though. But then at least their player apologized and even suggested they wouldn't do it anymore after it had happened again with themselves and someone else.

My bigger problem right now is that it seems even if I had been right and that there wasn't a story with Cassandra, the community praise would be roughly the same, meaning more such things are likely to happen and more frequently. From responses so far, including PMs, I'm feeling more and more right in my assessment of the community at large, with a small percentage of us (more than two now, but still very small) that wish things were different. That's why I won't be coming back when I leave, and why it's when and not if. Unless I can talk myself into leaving sooner, I'll be here until my current batch have all died. And I hope I get to see the stories behind their deaths as they're happening so I don't have to feel pent up for months until it comes out on the forums.

I hate the gimmickyness of killing people. drag them onto a boat they can't escape from, beat them to death while verbally justifying it. the old method of one person attacking a whole town with a duffle bag full of healing food. dragging some one into an apartment that's too full for people to help.

it seems like most of the killings are laden with awful game gimmicks.

I personally wish that a person received a sort of a penalty every time they killed a character. Call it madness, derangement, bloodlust, and that that was visible to other players. a little icon that looked like a skull ,or a bloodshot eye (to symbolize the crazy eye) to symbolize this person going absolutely mad from all their sociopathic murderings. a lot of people feel ill at ease talking to a true sociopath.

the crazy meter's main virtue is that you CAN kill trouble makersl, or people you hate, but not just go bonkers as easily. Reasonable people will want to avoid doing so. they'll 'let some one else' execute the prisoner rather than doing it themselves.

As it stands now a person can claim to be jill, ride into town on the "happy boat" drag some one onto their boat, kill them, go to another island, clame to be marla, kill some one their, re-name their boat and come back for another run (boat theft and renaming them to 'get away with it is really gimmicky too isn't it? side track )

Uma wrote: a lot of people feel ill at ease talking to a true sociopath.

Actually, sociopaths tend to be charming, and manipulative, helping them blend in with their local crowd of normal people. That's the scariest thing about them, they hide in plain sight in order to play all angles available to them for opportunities to get ahead, because that is all they see. Instead of people, they see targets, and pawns to be used, but they can only use people that trust them, and people will only trust them if they seem normal.

So if anything people would feel relatively at ease, at least, if they don't know it's a sociopath they are talking to.

Besides, not all killers are sociopaths.

You may still need to quit for other reasons like being too attached, but I wouldn't call the community a bunch of people who love killing. In reality there's really only a dozen English players or so that contribute to the forum, so even if all those players like the killing (which not all do) it's still a small portion of the Cantr community. I wouldn't try to group everyone into that same lot.

I feel like this thread was started at least in part in response to an earlier post of mine. Maybe I'm self-centered, but anyway...

Cantr is just a game. Cantr is also a great game, and a powerful one. You are right that it's a collective hallucination, in much the same way that life itself is. We are all writing the story of Cantr, just as we are all writing the story of the real world. The human brain is wired to wring meaning out of the universe, to invest it with meaning, and to do that in a narrative structure. Our own memories and lives are stories that we tell ourselves (and others), and edit, and refine over time, all unconsciously most of the time.

Since Cantr allows us to create characters that we can invest with emotion, that we spent time on, etc. of course we come to care about them, and to dislike the idea of their demise, and most of all their pointless demise. Does an actor playing Hamlet truly grieve on stage over the death of his father? In some sense, the actor does. Those feelings are real. They have to be, if the actor is any good, and the play is to transcend a recitation of lines and become an arc of communication between Shakespeare and the actors, between the actors and the audience, a collective dream that we dream together for a time and that can stay with us long after we wake and leave the theater.

Also, Cantr tends to attract, I think, people with high levels of empathy. People who are sensitive, creative, perhaps have addictive tendencies, artistic, probably introverted on some level... People who are more likely than most to lose themselves in a daydream. I've experienced real feelings of love, hatred, envy, fury, gratitude, admiration, fellowship, and all the rest through this game. With other characters, and with the people who play them.

But in the end, Cantr IS just a game. The actor who plays Othello on broadway can't go home to his apartment at the end of the day angry, bitter and carrying debilitating grief over the fact that Othello and Desdemona die in that play and the fact that Iago, whose motives are obscure and never revealed, is the one responsible... and he certainly can't despise and hold a grudge against the man who PLAYS Iago on the stage. An actor who does this is headed for a breakdown. He has to be able to do something rather incredible... that is, to live totally in the moment on stage, to pretend with excellence, to live and breathe a role and feel the feelings of his character; and then, to shed that role at the end of the day like a favorite outfit, and pack it away somewhere and get back to being who he really is.

Cantr is a GREAT game. It is also JUST a game.

It's only my opinion, but if you can't make that separation (and I've seen many people over 8-9 years of playing who can't), you are in some danger... maybe like Doug was when he first started playing, not that I would presume to know. Much as we would hate to see any good player go, maybe a break is necessary to restore much needed perspective.

Some part of me... the invested part if you will... HATES what Cassandra has done, and what ultimately ended up happening out of her pursuit. I was DEVASTATED by it... shattered. For about four hours. Then I got a good night's sleep, and woke up in the morning, and although the hatred lingered and still does, the part of me that's in the real world and just -plays- Cantr felt perfectly fine, thanks. And even had some grudging admiration for what Cassandra's player was able to pull off, and for the aftermath of it, and had appreciation for the range of emotions I was able to experience vicariously as a result, and the friendships my character developed as a result, and the growth my character experienced as a result. It was definitely a lot more enjoyable than 200 days of listening to lovebirds coo and twitter over each other in some dead end town somwhere, which does nothing whatsoever for me. It was a lot closer to Shakespeare or West Side Story than it was to the Simpsons or Gossip Girl. I'd much rather immerse myself in the former than the latter, given the chance.

Seko once said that Cantr has become like a doll's tea party. I kind of disagreed with her then, but it's true that without a Cassandra, without the threat of loss, meaningful or meaningless, without the opportunity for grand comedy or tragedy... Cantr can be like a doll's tea party. Maybe Cassandra was played well and maybe she wasn't, but she upended the tea party, that's for sure. And while my character involved is scarred forever by it... as a player, I have to admit that I'm glad she did.

An actor can go home knowing the play is finished.

Maybe I should too.