It Didn't Say Anywhere In The Rules That A Dog COULDN'T Play Basketball

I've not seen Air Bud, the 1997 Disney film that this game is very obviously a sequel to. (Or: not that obviously, if you don't know what Air Bud is. It's a feel-good film about a dog that can play basketball.) I believe that overfamiliarity with the source material can sour one's creativity, so I just skipped through the last part of the film and worked from there.

THE NIGHTMARE HOUND

Now in the movie, the dog is certainly instrumental to the team's victory, but it is the Hero Boy Josh who sinks the final shot and earns the respect of his rival on the opposing team, and who is accepted into his circle of friends, and who overcomes the loss of his father at such a young age through the power of wholesome American team sports. This is rank cowardice on director Charles Martin Smith's part, and I decided to step in and make some adjustments to the canon to ensure that this comedy-horror game in the vein of Horse Around The House lands with the proper gravitas.

So: it was the dog. The dog did it. The Hero Boy Josh is tangential and, honestly, not the reason anyone came to watch the film. It wasn't called Air Josh, was it. Also the dog is, for reasons yet undefined, a hateful spectre from outside of time that haunts the basketball boys until their dying breaths.

Credit where credit's due: the official owner of the dog, Buddy, is "an alcoholic clown called Norman Snivelly," which is fucking tremendous, and the film does indeed end with a newly liberated Buddy attacking the clown when given the chance to return home by a judge. (The clown is then arrested!)

But I wanted to explore a different kind of darkness here; the stomach-wrenching, bone-chilling terror of constant fear.

(This blog post is barely related to the game. It's like one of those recipes where you have to scroll through eight pages of waffle about the author's personal relationship with polenta before you can get to the weights and measures. I hope you're entertained.)

SCARY STUFF

I have a phobia. I don't talk about it online; I don't think I've ever really mentioned it before. But I have a wretched hot terror spiralled around the base of my skull: other people's music.

I think I get it from my dad. For about twenty years he ran a hotel on the Isle of Mull, more or less, with a mixture of assistance and active sabotage from his immediate family; Glenforsa Hotel, as it is still known, is not even on one of the busier parts of Mull, and Mull has a total population of about three thousand people.

Dad married one of the waitresses who came to the island from mainland Scotland to do some summer work (hi Mum!) and, after selling the hotel and briefly sojourning in the north of England for six years to gently usher his elderly father into the grave, moved the lot of us to southern Portugal on account of land being cheap there. (Man loves a bargain. When he was in better health, his hobby was buying large, discounted things we didn't need and then building ramshackle sheds to keep them in.) I spent the formative teenage years of my life on a hill in a foreign country three miles from the nearest tarmacked road; he and Mum are still there.

For the six years we spent in the north of England - in Carlisle, specifically, a place with very little to offer aside from plenty of trains to Scotland - we lived in a semi-detached house. Dad wasn't used to living so close to other people, and they would wind him up; the chap next door rented out one of the floors to students - there was an art college up the road - and they'd play music, sometimes late at night, and Dad would get furious about it.

Dad, one weekend, when we were going away to my aunt's, put the radio on full blast, wedged it up against the wall in his bedroom, and then left the house out of spite.

THE BIG SMOKE

It was a tense situation. I don't remember being especially bothered about loud music as a child, or indeed in my early twenties when I was living in Norwich and either in halls next to a reggae enthusiast or one street over from Prince of Wales road's stickiest nightclubs, but something shifted when we moved to London. Dad's antic disposition flared in my mind.

I think, perhaps, it was the scale of the place; I'd never really known my neighbours, but I really didn't know my neighbours in London, and there was a group two doors down that'd have shindigs in their garden into the wee hours of the morning. Norwich felt like mine; London would never feel like that. I was on the outside of it. Or rather: it was on the outside of me, and it would get in.

I began to grow apprehensive of hearing music. Just music; don't give a damn about kids running around. You can cram in all the construction noise you like and I'll lump it. Hold the Indy 500 outside my office for all I care; just don't amplify any fucking music and we're golden.

What began as an irritation became a full-blown fear. I was scared of being kept awake, and this is back in the days when I had to show up to work at something approaching at set time. I was scared of having nowhere in my flat - my pokey, moth-infested, damp, not-technically-in-Tooting-but-we-say-it's-in-Tooting flat - to go to escape the noise.

And I think, at the heart of it, I was jealous of other people having fun. I was jealous that I was trying to sleep and here they are jumping up and down and hooting on trumpets, or what have you. I was furious that at the age of twenty five I was already behaving like my fifty-year old father was, although I never resorted to assault radios.

The worst thing about phobias, and no-one mentions this, isn't when the thing is in the room. When the music started I had tricks I could deploy; I could use earplugs, turn on a fan for some white noise, wear some headphones to block out the sound. The issue came from being scared that it was going to happen all the fucking time. Weekends, often the noisiest time of the week, hung heavy over me. Bank Holidays were the worst. Whenever I heard a car going past playing music, my heart would freeze - what if it was next door? What if they never stopped? How dare they invade my space, my sanctuary, like this? I would pause about once an hour and have a really good listen to make sure I couldn't hear anything.

A PART-TIME ROLE IN BEING TERRIFIED

This is, of course, deranged. (I'm reclaiming the word.) And it filled me up. Five moves later, in a flat on the grimier side of Victoria park in Hackney, I found myself surrounded with noise. Aisha, the lovely woman next door who would invite over her aging boyfriend and listen to worship reggae together. The twenty-somethings on the on the other side, who had cool parties about once a month, and then the infinitely cooler Spanish twenty-somethings who replaced them in mid 2020 and held all-night raves/Coronavirus networking events directly underneath my bathroom. The Italians two doors down who listened to what seemed like the menu screen noise from a games console at maximum volume whilst sitting at trestle tables. Nick, upstairs, whose unseen flatmate really liked 90's dance. The guy two storeys up who preferred modern R&B and yelling at Xbox Live.

By the time 2022 rolled around, I was riddled with near-constant anxiety. I couldn't bear it. There was, more often, no music than there was music; but the fear of it, the heart-pounding goosebumps dread of the thing, even when I was fully able to walk next door and ask those Spanish twentysomethings to please turn it down because it's 1am, ramshackled me.

I was spending upwards of twenty percent of my brainpower at any given point thinking about it, expecting it, watching for it. All that preparation and watchfulness had precisely zero impact on the way I would react to the problem actually occurring. I was devoted to the fear. I abided by it. I paid my dues and worshipped the beast. It formed the shape that my brain was.

However. That year that I would move again, this time outside of a major conurbation and instead to the rolling green valleys and innumerable hills of Sheffield's outskirts, and my brain changed shape. I no longer lived in fear. I no longer ran paranoiac mental models of how likely it would be that any one of my neighbours might have friends over tonight based on recent behaviour, upcoming festivals and local weather patterns. I no longer crept into my bedroom, lights off, mouth agape to hear better, to see if I was under threat.

It's nice!

I'm not, you know, fixed. I've taken zero steps to address the root causes of the phobia; I just moved to a place where I have more room and fewer neighbours. The hairs still raise up on my forearms when I hear someone playing music nearby. But it's much less frequent out here in the country than it was in London, and the fact that my house isn't connected to any other houses is, I presume, paramount.

ANYWAY, THE GAME

All of which is to say: I am no stranger to misplaced fear.

I liked the idea of treating the light-hearted toss on offer in Air Bud as something more serious, in the vein of modern criticisms of the unusual amount of manslaughter in Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory:

Or literal examinations of texts severed from their context over time:

So, like many of my games, this one began as a shitpost:

I had an image in my mind of a beleaguered loser at his wit's end, obsessing over this fucking dog that came out of nowhere and ruined his life at a pivotal moment. And then, because it's a game and you have to give the players something to do, I drummed up a quick scenario focusing around one of the characters' second wedding for the dog to ruin.

The core mechanic is lifted partially from Royal Blood, a game I wrote in 2016 and rewrote earlier this year; it's a 4+ success with complications dressed up in a funny hat and you've seen it a dozen times before since Blades in the Dark adopted it from Apocalypse World but took out the "adding together the dice" bit.

The interesting thing here is the pacing, however; once four cards that match in suit or number have been played, the game is (mostly) over. That leads to a very variable experience: it could be over in four draws, if you're unlucky, or stretch out to sixteen if you're not. The chance for players to choose which card to play if they're playing to their obsessions opens up a choice, too: it might be that to succeed at a task, the dog's machinations move forward.

And like: the dog is there. The dog is always there, waiting. The dog will ruin this wedding. (Probably.) We don't know how the dog will ruin the wedding, and indeed the lives of those involved, or how it will reveal their shameful secrets. It's hanging Damoclesian over the entire event, and it cannot be stopped. Your actions have very little impact on the nightmare that is coming to you, but that nightmare occupies part of your brain in a way you cannot escape.

Maz says, like Horse Around The House, that this is an inscrutable game and they have no idea why anyone would play it. I like to think that means it's art.

Love and fury,

• Grant "Misophonia" Howitt

P.S. This is my ninety-ninth one page game. Next one will be the hundredth, and therefore will come with some sort of... event. Celebration? Jam? Ascension? I don't know yet. But that means that unlike normal, where we send out physicals every three months, we're going to wait an extra month and then bundle whatever the hell it is I do for #100 into the envelope as well.

And: I don't know what I'm going to do with this Patreon, after that. Something useful. It's been nice writing these extended blog posts and design notes, and I very much enjoyed working with other creators (even if it often ended up being more labour-intensive than just doing it myself) so I might do something with that. Suggestions welcome.