The Myth Weavers

For our first game, we decided to start with Primetime Adventures, ironically enough for a bunch of rewilders not particularly impressed with the nature of mass media.  But then again, in terms of restoring our natural oral traditions, what better place to start than by appropriating the conventions of television, right?  We did something that I personally think of as really innovative.  We present Primetime Adventures‘ first wildlife documentary—

Premise

Around the world, humans have shared a unique relationship with canids. Today, often hunted to the brink of extinction, wolves and coyotes have done extraordinary things to adapt to this new world. Howl of the People follows the social life and drama of canid lives in transition, packs living on the edge of civilization, struggling to find a place for themselves between diminishing wild habitat and the expansion of civilization.  Like Meerkat Manor or Orangutan Island, Howl of the People looks closely enough at these packs for their individual personalities to take center-stage, and the inter-personal drama of how they relate to one another.

We’ve planned three short seasons for the series, moving from west to east. In season one, we’ll follow a wolf pack recolonizing the Cascades. In season two, we’ll see how coyotes live in the suburbs of Calgary. In season three, we’ll follow packs of “eastern coyote” in western Pennsylvania.

Conventions

We want to emphasize eloquence and poetry, with thick description that appeals to synaesthetic experience and senses other than sight, particularly scent. Violence shouldn’t distract us from that, so when the plot goes there, we won’t shy away from graphic descriptions of violence, but by the same token, we won’t add violence for its own sake, either.  On the other hand, we all feel sufficiently uncomfortable with cross-species erotica to just “fade to black” when it comes to canid mating. Ideally, we could tell the whole story from thick descriptions, odors and body movements, but if we have to resort to talking animals from time to time, we can accept that as a shorthand that compensates for our limited olfactory vocabulary. If it takes you a while to figure out that the characters appear as wolves, all the better. Like most native human groups, they also refer to themselves as “the People,” and speak more in terms of verbs and patterns of movement than the literate habit of referring to things and their attributes.

Tone

Like Meerkat Manor and related shows, Howl of the People takes other-than-human personhood seriously. If not for the accident of their species, you might see these characters on an hour-long HBO drama.  We’ll have tension and drama, but we also want to show ‘the good life’ that wild creatures can have. The series emphasizes questions of nativeness vs. invasiveness, bioregional connection, wildness, feralness, and domestication.

Tags: Games, Howl of the People, Primetime Adventures

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 10th, 2008 at 10:30 am and is filed under Games, Games We Play. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.