Off Script

The slide says "Procedural Rhetoric in Climate Narratives" but I'm staring at it like it's written in a language I used to speak but can't remember anymore.

Twenty-seven people waiting. My mouth opens and the words come out automatically: "Interactive media demonstrates significant potential for communicating environmental urgency through player agency mechanisms that..."

I stop. Mid-sentence. The words taste like cardboard.

Something in my stomach turns over. Not nerves—recognition. I know this feeling. It's the same one I get when I catch myself saying "fine" when someone asks how I am and I'm anything but fine. Performance mode. Autopilot. Saying what I'm supposed to say instead of what I actually think.

I click to the next slide without meaning to. Muscle memory. There's a diagram showing player engagement metrics that I spent five hours making the week before. It looks important. Official.

Completely dead.

"Actually," I hear myself say, and my voice drops about half an octave. Conversation voice instead of presentation voice. "That's not why I care about these games."

The room shifts. Subtle, but I feel it. Like the air pressure changed.

"I care because I was playing this game about running a ferry for dead animals and I started crying so hard I had to pause it."

Silence. The kind that makes you want to fill it immediately with qualifications and explanations and academic hedging.

I don't.

"So then I spent a month trying to figure out why a pixel cat made me sob uncontrollably."

My hands are shaking slightly. There's sweat under my arms that wasn't there two minutes ago. Everything I've been trained to do as an academic is screaming at me to get back on script. Cite some theory. Reference the literature. Prove I'm serious.

Instead I click past the next three slides without reading them.

Each slide I skip feels like stepping off a cliff. My academic training is screaming. Two months of research reduced to mouse clicks. The diagram about player engagement metrics disappears. The framework comparison chart. The methodology section I'd stressed over for weeks.

Gone. All of it gone.

My chest feels lighter with each click. Like taking off clothes that never fit properly.

"Here's what I think happened," I say, looking at actual faces instead of the back wall for the first time since I started talking. "The game made me practice saying goodbye to something I loved. Over and over. Until goodbye stopped feeling like failure and started feeling like... I don't know. Something you can learn to do well?"

Someone in the second row nods. Tiny movement, but I see it.

That nod changes everything. Suddenly I'm not performing for an abstract audience. I'm talking to that specific person who understands something about pixel cats and unexpected grief. To the person in the corner who's leaning forward now. To another frantically scribbling notes about something I haven't even figured out yet.

I can see their faces clearly for the first time. When did that happen? When did they stop being "the audience" and become... people I was thinking with?

"And I started wondering if that's what we actually need to learn about climate change. Not more data about carbon emissions. Not better communication strategies. But practice with letting go of things we can't save."

I'm thinking out loud now. Following connections as they form. No idea where this is heading.

"Like, what if environmental games work backwards? What if instead of teaching you to solve ecological problems, they teach you how to grieve ecologically? How to love something enough to let it go?"

My voice is doing something different. Less controlled. More like how I talk to friends over dinner when I get excited about an idea.

Someone in the front row raises their hand. I nod at hthemer.

"Are you saying we should give up on environmental action?"

"No," I say immediately, then pause. Actually think about it. "Maybe I'm saying we should get better at loving impermanently? Like, the game doesn't teach you to save the dead animals. It teaches you to care for them completely while you have them, then let them go when it's time."

My prepared conclusion had something about "further research implications." I can see it on slide seventeen, waiting for me. I'm not going there.

"I don't know what that means for policy," I admit. "But I know it changed how I think about my own attachments. To places that might flood. To forests that are currently fading like in the Harz mountains, where I come from. To species that might disappear. To ways of life that might not survive what's coming."

Questions start coming that I wasn't prepared for. Someone wants to know what other games have made me think about loss. Another person asks if virtual grief feels different from real grief. Another wonders whether practice with impermanence might be more valuable than practice with activism.

I don't have good answers. I have guesses. Partial thoughts. Connections I'm making as I speak them.

Twenty minutes later, I'm done talking and I have no idea what just happened. The applause sounds different from usual. Less polite. More... puzzled? Engaged?

Three people approach afterward. Not to argue with my methodology or question my theoretical framework. To tell me about their own experiences with games and grief. To share stories about learning to let go through play.

After the conference, I feel hollowed out in the best way. Like I've said something true instead of something correct. Like I've shared actual thinking instead of performed thinking.

My phone buzzes. Email from someone who was in the audience. "Can you recommend games that can engage me with emotional skills? My father is dying and I think I need practice with goodbye."

I stare at the message for a long time. This is why we do this work, isn't it? Not to advance our careers or build our CVs or prove we're smart enough to be here. To help people think through things that matter.

To think with them instead of at them.

I delete my prepared presentation slides without saving them.

The delete button feels like the best decision I've made all week.

Image: © Victoria Mummelthei rabbitingyears