The Adventure Gaming Periodical - Issue #12 - My Life as a Horse
Reflections on Horse Girl by Samuel Mui and Published by Leyline Press
This newest issue of The AGP is a personal essay and review of the game Horse Girl.
Trigger Warning: Nudity, Illness, Dissociation, Abuse, Surgery, Body Horror, Psychedelic Drug Use, Stillbirth, Coming Out, Trauma Bonding, Torture
My personal life is a hot mess, and I needed to leave home for six days for a conference in Philadelphia. I put on my strong face, so I could be there to see my students present. They’re so brilliant.
The trip is good, the food is great, the negativity to come is portended by the strap on my work bag breaking as I walked back to my hotel one afternoon for a nap.
That evening I go to a lame reception at a fancy hotel, but then I make it to a barcade to play some pinball: Godzilla and Vector. 2:30 in the morning is when it hits, the fever. I’m now alone in a hotel room across the country from home going through twelve hours of unpleasant illness.
I’m able to wake up to Doordash some pho and Ibuprofen for breakfast, and then sleep the rest of the day until I’m awoken by sweat. My fever had broken.
I draw myself a bath to rinse off and to ground myself back into my body, not ready to rejoin the world at large. I stumble back through my hotel room, naked and slightly dissociated, trying to figure out what to do next.
I realized that I had been dragging around my copy of Horse Girl in my bag, I’d been meaning to show it to my friend. If you don’t already know Horse Girl is a solo journaling ttrpg with the following premise.
You are a woman in her late 20s. Life has not been kind to you, as much as you have tried to make things work…But things changed when you met Him: a handsome, intelligent young doctor who saw the light in you where everyone else saw emptiness…To truly live was to live with Him and for Him. As time went on, you fell deeper in love as you grew further and further away from your friends and family…when He offers you a room in His mansion where the both of you can live together in bliss for the rest of your lives, you say “Yes!” - even if the sole condition is that you’ll be surgically and mentally transformed into a horse…An entirely new body and mind is such a small price to pay for a lifetime of peace and happiness, you think.
In that liminal space away from home in between sickness and health, I realized that it was now the time to play Horse Girl. I’d been saving the game for a time when I was in a good headspace, much like taking psychedelic drugs, but I was drawn to it in this moment of strange loneliness.
I gather the cards and the zine, I get together a pen and a journal that I’d received as swag out of my purse, and I look to see what else I need. I didn’t travel with any dice or a Jenga tower, but thankfully there are plenty of dice roller web sites, and there is an alternate method for simulating the Jenga tower using a counter and some dice rolls. Finally, I need some tokens, so I pull ten pennies out of the change pocket in purse. It is important to note that I’m still nude while doing all of this, as indicated by the game.
To play, you will need: A red marker or pen to draw on your naked skin…For the full experience, I’d recommend you play the game completely naked while immersed in nature.
I was not able to be in nature, and I was not able to write on my body, but I was able to situate myself on my hotel bed as I started to play.
The game is a reflective experience. It’s emotional. It’s one of the most powerful experiences in my life, only trailing behind the traumatic birth of my first child, holding my second stillborn daughter in my arms, and coming out as trans. I’m a weepy, snotty mess as I finish the game. I lose, I give into my life as a horse.
Horse Girl uses the randomness of cards and dice to capture the inconsistent reinforcement of a trauma bond. There are moments of beauty and love and memory punctuated by moments of anger, torture, and emotional silencing. The feeling of someone being the only person who sees a lovable person inside of you, but only when you serve their emotional needs. I finished the game identifying my own moment of when I gave into my own “life as a horse.”
My trip to Philadelphia and my play through of Horse Girl mirrored my life in ways I had never predicted. Heightened moments of joy interrupted by misery and sadness, but at least in the case of my trip, I came out the other side of my fever feeling clear and understanding that things will be better when I make it through the other side of this mess. Unlike the protagonist of Horse Girl my story isn’t over, and my “life as a horse” is not permanent.
I can’t recommend Horse Girl to anyone as a fun game, but if you are ready to give in to a full body emotional experience, it can change you. It’s not a popcorn movie, it is the tabletop gaming experience of watching a film like Possession. It’s not for everyone, but it is breathtaking in its beauty, sadness, and ugliness all nested inside of each other.
Crowdfunding
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Wow such a powerful story you've told us. Thank you for sharing!