One thing that surprised me to recognize running this game, is my own relationship to performance in this game were I am trying to provoke players to play as themselves.

An aspect of my own personality I have been grappling with lately is my hyper independence interfering with my ability to ask for support. And my ambition has led me to create this enormous project - enormous conceptually, meaning I should be calling on many minds for input, but also enormous physically - I am physically incapable of setting up, tearing down and transporting the installation by myself, even within the same building. I've also needed to call on favours just to get thing ready in time. The result is, I push off asking for help until the very last second, when not doing so is going to cause problems for even more people, and I pull everyone into my stress. I'm getting better at it, but it still feels very awful. No one else seems to need as much help as I do all the time.

I am very shy about asking people to take time out of their lives to engage with my work, and scared that it will not be good enough to justify wasting their time on it.

While running this game I feel myself falling into a character to lead people through. I considered doing this intentionally, but I'm not sure it suits it since I want the game to "feel real" and of course everyone will know that I am lying. But I can't seem to help it if I wanted to - I do not want to engage with running the game sincerely, it is very embarrassing to ask people to spend time on something I made, especially because it is kind of silly right now. I do not want to be vulnerable when I am keyed up because I will probably cry if anyone says anything nice or mean about it. (So far people have only been mean by accident, comparing it to things that are not what I'm going for.) Being a pretend person is the only way I can make it through this terrible part of the project.

Could I have somehow made a project where I don't have to interact with people? I didn't really consider how miserable it would make me and now I'm going to have to do it over and over again for months. If I had just cut the physical aspect and sent out software to a mailing list, I could just set up a screen at the exhibition and hid around the corner all night. I could have hid in my house and not had to put my own body and identity and ego in the game. I never wanted it there. I only wanted the game to eat other people.

I wish I could hire an actor to do it for me, but then I would have to interact with the actor and depend on them to show up on time and follow my directions and maybe ask them to change. That would mean dealing with one person a lot for a long time, instead of dozens of people in short bursts. Dealing with the same person twice means that everything you said wrong last time will haunt you going into the next time, and that's probably worse. Individuals will probably forget about one conversation as soon as it's over, or so I tell myself whenever I have to do one of these things.

Anyway - I do really like performing! At least the little I take on - I am not an actor, I am just a game master. I thought about being an actor, I used to act, but I am not good at remembering lines until I've done it a million times. And I do not enjoy being in my own body, so my acting does not extend that far. It's just talking about things that don't exist as though they're real, fake sounds coming out of my own real face. If I could change my physical form as easily as I can construct a different reality to react to, I could probably get more into it.

Performing also puts me in a position where I don't have to worry so much about when it's appropriate to speak or how much to share. If I am the center of attention, I have control over the conversation in a way that I won't step on people, because they are there to work around what I lay down for them. Teaching is like this, too. Being a student is harder. I feel a larger responsibility to reflect reality in these positions (actual reality as a teacher, or fictional reality as a GM,) but the smaller nuisances of taking up an appropriate amount of space and time are largely irrelevant and planned for in advance. People consent to attend a performance in advance.