Page 51 of Looking for Group

Alexis: Circling back to the “gaming addiction” point, I think it’s notable that what’s happened here is that Drew and his friends have spent eight hours engaged in an entirely pointless screen-based activity and nobody feels they’ve done anything weird or unhealthy.

Whereas if he and Kit had spent a similar amount of time trying to down bosses with a group of people who happened not to be in the same room as them, it would come across as both of those things.

9. Paragraph begins with: “You know,” said Kit softly…

Alexis: I love this observation but my inner pedant wants to point out that the billionaire and his parents were actually on their way home from seeing The Mark of Zorro at the cinema which, when you think about it, is even weirder than the opera thing.

Like how many millionaires get dressed up in their best fur coats and thematically resonant pearls to go and see general-release movies?

I’m pretty sure it’s not even a premiere.

10. Paragraph begins with: “Squidge, it’s not a personal insult when someone wants to leave your house.”

Alexis: Circling back to the alpha-nerd thing, in my entirely subjective experience this is a really big thing in geek circles.

There used to be a thing on the internet that I’m not sure people still reference (although it’s still googlable) called “the Geek Social Fallacies” which—and this is a vague summary from memory decades after the fact—frames the more dysfunctional aspects of geek culture as a consequence of people who have experienced a lot of social rejection suddenly having friends.

This thing where Sanee and Drew feel mildly betrayed that not every single one of their friends wants to hang out with literally every single other one of their friends literally all of the time is very Geek Social Fallacies behaviour.

11. Paragraph begins with: [Guild][Ialdir]

Alexis: The inherently multitasked nature of online communications was something I really wanted to bring across in this book because it’s something I think is kind of unique to online spaces (although those boundaries are getting more slippery in the social media age).

Still, if you were having an argument with your partner at a party, even somebody really socially oblivious would think twice about trying to have a conversation about Planescape: Torment with you at the exact same time, and even if they did, you wouldn’t feel a social expectation to actually engage with them.

But the rules are different on the interwebs.

12. Paragraph begins with: [Guild][Ialdir]

Alexis: FWIW, this is real, valid Torment advice. But the story Ialdir is telling here, about ruining Torment for someone else because you love it too much, might be slightly based on something I may have actually done.

Chapter Eleven

1. Paragraph begins with: Tinuviel accepted her award gravely, peeled off the paper, and devoured it in two large bites.

Alexis: To be fair, I don’t think I’d recognise a cancel or a breaker if I fell over it either. I keep abstractly thinking I’d like to get into fighting games, but it turns out they’re actually really hard and require, like, work and shit?

2. Paragraph begins with: Kit reached over and took his hand—and that was such a relief that Drew couldn’t remember if he was supposed to be angry right now.

Alexis: I think in a lot of deprecated subcultures—be they gaming communities or genre fiction fandoms—people can tend to have this defence mechanism where they respond to the knowledge that people look down on the thing they care about by performatively looking down on the things other people care about even harder.

In geek circles in particular, it’s a toss-up whether this defensive-down-looking will be directed at a less socially acceptable end of geekdom (like MMO players or anime fans) or at some bit of mainstream culture that the individual geek doesn’t personally invest in (like “sportsball”).

I don’t want to pretend that I’m immune to this tendency myself because I’m sure I’m not, but I do generally think the world would be a nicer place if we all accepted that things other people care about have value, even if we don’t care about them ourselves.

3. Paragraph begins with: Everyone was already settled, helping themselves to Steff’s brain-cakes and immersed in a warm-up hand of Munchkin Zombies.

Alexis: Give Me the Brain was published in 1997 by a company called “Cheapass Games” whose core design philosophy was to make games that focused on concept and gameplay rather than production values.

A big part of their USP was that they assumed you already owned dice, tokens, playing pieces, and the like, so they didn’t have to sell you those separately (I think this in and of itself implies some assumptions about how games work which are themselves a bit 1990s).

They seem to be in a weird IP limbo at the moment, but you can still access a lot of their back catalogue in print-and-play PDF form.

4. Paragraph begins with: From there, they got serious and, after a brief debate, chose Zombicide over Dead of Winter as their main game of the evening.

Alexis: These two games are incredibly different, and actually in virtually all contexts picking Zombicide is the wrong choice.

Ultimately, they’re both what board gamers would call “Ameritrash”—games that go big on production values and maximalist genre emulation over the more “Eurogame” focus on design elegance and worker placement.

But Zombicide is also one of those very endless-supplements-sells-itself-on-novelty games that doesn’t actually have that fun of a core game loop when you get right down to it.

Buuuut there are times, like those described here, where you just wanna kill a bunch of zombies.

And in that case, Zombicide and its bazillion expansions definitely have your back.

5. Paragraph begins with: Drew was less than thrilled to realise that not only was he playing the boring…

Alexis: Drew is right here. The Survivalist is the worst character. I will take no further questions.

6. Paragraph begins with: Kit got up, tucked his phone into his breast pocket, and left the room.

Alexis: I know romance sometimes gets a bad rap, even within its own community, for some of its predictabilities of structure—especially the emotional nadir of “oh no, perhaps we cannot be together after all” that tends to appear at about the 70 percent mark of most books.

The thing is, though, I think moments like these do important work.

Yes, they may be predictable sometimes, but part of that predictability is down to character.

Like you definitely don’t want a situation where two characters break up over something you had no idea about, and couldn’t see coming.

No, the “point” (insomuch as anything has a point) of an emotional nadir is to explore the moment when aspects of the characters’ identities (be that past trauma, their personal values, or something else entirely) collide, apparently unreconcilably.

The magic trick is less the collision than the reconciliation because it allows the characters to grow, change, and demonstrate not only their mutual commitment—even in the face of conflict—but their increasing understanding of each other too.

To me, a good emotional nadir + reconciliation is about specifics of character and situation.

Like, this one is, in many respects, incredibly mild (especially if you compare it to something like A Lady for a Duke , where the emotional nadir is literally about Viola’s agency and her right to live as herself).

The thing is, though, it’s not mild to Kit and Drew.

In its own way, it’s as much about acceptance as the scene with Viola and Gracewood, it’s just it’s tuned to reflect a different time of life, where the stakes and the priorities are also different.

7. Paragraph begins with: “I was just, like, saying stuff.”

Alexis: Ultimately Sanee and Drew’s relationship would be a lot healthier if they didn’t come from a context, both as young men and as nerds, where they were acculturated to believe that it was impossible for them to meaningfully hurt each other.

8. Paragraph begins with: “Drew, I’m a skinny Asian dude who’s had one girlfriend in his entire life.”

Alexis: This is sort of the flip side of Drew’s pride (at the start of the book) in being “not like other nerds.” Sanee, ultimately, feels like he genuinely can’t access traditional masculinity in a way that paradoxically leads to him (and Drew for that matter) enacting a version of it that is just as problematic for them both as the more straightforward sports-and-booze kind of machismo.

Chapter Twelve

1. Paragraph begins with: [Solace] whispers

Alexis: I’m going to be honest, I’m really proud of Kobold-Together Boombox as a name for a quirky vanity item from an obscure quest in a certain type of MMO.

2. Paragraph begins with: [Solace] whispers

Alexis: Temporarily returning to the subject of emotional nadirs and reconciliations, it felt really important to me to have Kit and Drew’s reconciliation take place within the virtual world that was partially involved in the conflict.

Also, as part of the broader theme of recognising the value of virtual spaces, I wanted to have a romantic gesture that wasn’t physical but still had meaning to the people involved.

3. Paragraph begins here: To [Solace]

Alexis: Not to sound like Ash at the end of Glitterland , but it’s really important to me that not every romance I write involves an “I love you.” Sometimes, yes, of course.

But the words themselves should not be mandatory for a happy ending—especially when you’re dealing with nineteen-year-olds who have been dating for less than a month.

4. Paragraph begins with: To [Solace]

Alexis: I know I have a bit of a reputation for abrupt endings, but for a book that’s so much about virtual spaces and virtual communications, it just felt really right for it to end on “omw.”