Roller Drama
Sport, dystopia and psychology combine in a giddy original
PC
Unfocus your eyes for long enough and Roller Drama can seem like a pretty straightforward sports game, a sturdy blend of action and strategy, rendered in neonoir purple and yellow. The sport in question is a slimmed-down recreation of roller derby, in which teams of rollerskaters lap an arena to score points while preventing their opponents from doing likewise. Between matches, you chat with team members and play a turnbased minigame to hone their abilities.
Nothing too outrageous there, but that’s before you consider the characters. These include a shrunken Shakespeare head who serves as your coach’s inner voice, and a mummified cat your players confide in. The game’s management elements, meanwhile, aren’t about managing physical traits but states of mind. They’re based on the research of Polish psychologist Kazimierz Dabrowski, who argued that conditions like depression can be a process of “positive disintegration” toward personal fulfilment. Aside from visiting the girls in your care (all of whom share a run-down apartment block), you help them grow as people by playing “Battle Go”, a turn-based self-help app.
The app is also a surveillance tool – the product of a 1970s-styled dystopia redolent of Terry Gilliam and The Hunger Games, where automation has theoretically brought about “robot communism” and privacy violations are endemic. In addition to mentoring your players, you need to keep them out of the hands of the ever-watchful police. All of this is couched in absurdist writing that sometimes erupts, for no particular reason, into Renaissance poesy. “The game is funny, but it’s in the context of a tragic environment, which as a British person you’re very familiar with,” Open Labs’ lead designer Pietro Polsinelli tells us encouragingly. “There’s a dimension of catastrophe – little things going wrong that become worse and worse.”
Open Labs has a record of blurring the lines between academia, social work and entertainment. Much of Roller Drama springs from Polsinelli’s research at the University Of Milan, and his hope is that it will leave players more informed about the workings of the psyche. “It’s not like reading an academic book on psychology, [but] we’re trying to send a message. It’s a ridiculous story, but you can say very serious things behind silly stuff.” The girls in your team run a gamut of personality types, backgrounds and psychological conditions. One player has intermittent explosive disorder, meaning she may react disproportionately when provoked. Polsinelli likens this aspect of the game to the inner worlds of Disco Elysium, but in Roller Drama, you’re nurturing five people rather than one.
Open Labs blurs the lines between academia, social work and entertainment
How secure and fulfilled your girls feel affects their stamina and self-control during matches, where you set team formations and speeds while deploying card-based special moves. Players may get thrown out of the match if they let their emotions get the better of them. Mentoring your team well also makes them more politically and socially aware, to the point that they might get involved with a resistance organisation. “This is one of the themes: are you sufficiently secure in yourself, confident in yourself that you start being attentive to other people’s problems, which may be just the other girls’ problems or society-wide problems?” Mentor your players badly, however, and the team may succumb to in-fighting. The story unfolds via quests rather than as a linear plot, with some outcomes dependent on having enough of a reputation to qualify for the biggest matches.
Roller Drama takes some unpacking, and we’re concerned that its riot of influences and tones will prove self-consuming. The game is as conflicted as the sport it describes, each ingredient struggling to elbow its way to the fore. It has charm and personality to spare, however, and its emphasis on the social and psychological dynamics of professional sport could prove essential, providing Open Labs can bring everything together.