benlehman

I just sent in an e-mail interview for a Swedish gaming magazine called Fenix. I was really happy with one of my answers so I'm reposting it below. If you haven't played Polaris it probably won't make sense. It would also help if you've read "The Language of the Night."

> Q: Can you elobarate a little bit regarding the use of key phrases in
> Polaris, why are they important?

Key Phrases serve two roles in Polaris. In the first role, they serve
to frame the game, the characters, and the scenes within the game. A
simple, repeated ritual phrase has an important meaning to humanity --
that's why we use them in religious rituals and early childhood
teaching. It signifies that this text is important, set apart. The
content of the phrases then sets it deeply into the realm of fiction,
fantasy, the unreal. When we use the key phrases as a frame, we are
letting the other players know that we are now speaking in (as Ursula
LeGuin writes about) the language of the night -- reveling in
absurdity and fantasy at an angle to our mundane lives. (That the
setting is contrasts night with day is an exercise to the reader.)

Key phrases are also a means to cross lesser boundaries within the
game -- when they are used for conflict, they cross the boundaries of
authority that the players are allowed during the game. The structure
of them is such that we meet each other at equal footing during this
crossing -- that when I push my statements into the realm of your
authority, your authority naturally and completely flows in an equal
and opposite reaction into my realms.

A lot of people talk about the key phrases as if the exciting thing
about them is that they use words instead of dice. This is fine, but
there are a number of games that do that, many of which predated and
inspired Polaris. The exciting thing about them to me is their
liminality. They systematically function to both build boundaries
(between the real and unreal, one character and another, one scene and
another) and push through and over those boundaries.