Have you heard of Will Hindmarch’s anthology The Bones? It’s a book about dice, our love of them, and the cool things they’ve done for us. Will’s one of the people I can say influenced my decision to get into game design professionally. The book contains essays by a number of outstanding authors, including Jason L Blair, Jess Hartley, Fred Hicks, Kenneth Hite, Jeff Tidball, Monica Valentinelli, Chuck Wendig (who contributed to Maschine Zeit,) and Wil Wheaton. Will’s doing a blog carnival in promotion, so I thought I’d participate.

Your Dice Chakra

We’re going to do a little exercise. Bear with me.

1. Relax. You can do this on your office chair, sofa, or wherever you’re reading this.
2. Put your hands out, facing each other with fingers about six inches apart.
3. Breathe slowly. Take deep, cleansing breaths throughout the exercise.
4. Bring your hands together as slowly as possible. If you’re manually dexterous, consider doing this with your eyes closed.
5. As you get within an inch or so, pay close attention to the sensation. You might tingle. You might notice tension in your arms. You might feel resistance between your hands.

Got that? Good.

That’s a simple introduction to chakras, a Hindu concept. Depending on your beliefs, there are a number of explanations for that feeling. Science says your nerves are firing off, your physical senses are telling your fingers that they’re close to one another, and you’re particularly sensitive to it because of your slowed breathing and direct focus. The Hindus believe your body has connection with a second, spirit-body. It doesn’t really matter what’s correct; either way, it has everything to do with connectivity.

Now, it’s time for exercise two.

Look back on your experience with dice. It could be in roleplaying game form. It can be in Yahtzee form. It can be craps. Think back to a favorite experience playing a game using dice, particularly when those dice were in your hand. Close your eyes. Envision the context, where you were, what it smelled like. Once you’re there, focus on the dice in your hand. Were you on your last hit points, one critical away from slaying the dragon? Were you at the end of a winning streak in Vegas, one good roll away from the best vacation of your life?

As you mentally roll those dice, can you feel the resistance? Do you feel the near-identical tingle in your arm, do your fingers twitch and fight as your mind lets go of the dice? Congratulations, you’ve found your dice chakra.

Your dice chakra does the same thing your hand chakra does. It gives you a little sensation, a little tension. If you focus properly, it’s really rather intense. If you want to approach it from a spiritual angle, your dice chakra is your connection to the spirit-body that is your story. The dice have this great role to play. They’re pure tension, then they’re pure release (be it good or bad.) Alfred Hitchcock famously described the difference between surprise and suspense as:

“We are now having a very innocent little chat. Let’s suppose that there is a bomb underneath this table between us. Nothing happens, and then all of a sudden, “Boom!” There is an explosion. The public is surprised, but prior to this surprise, it has seen an absolutely ordinary scene, of no special consequence. Now, let us take a suspense situation. The bomb is underneath the table and the public knows it, probably because they have seen the anarchist place it there. The public is aware the bomb is going to explode at one o’clock and there is a clock in the decor. The public can see that it is a quarter to one. In these conditions, the same innocuous conversation becomes fascinating because the public is participating in the scene. The audience is longing to warn the characters on the screen: “You shouldn’t be talking about such trivial matters. There is a bomb beneath you and it is about to explode!”
In the first case we have given the public fifteen seconds of surprise at the moment of the explosion. In the second we have provided them with fifteen minutes of suspense. The conclusion is that whenever possible the public must be informed. Except when the surprise is a twist, that is, when the unexpected ending is, in itself, the highlight of the story.”

The dice are your bomb. You can hold them as long as you’d like. At a certain point, the tension’s bound to become too much. If you’re playing a good game, you will need to let go and release that tension. It might explode. It might be a dud. Regardless, you need that answer. This is the purpose of your dice chakra. When you’re at the edge, peering over, needing to know what comes next, your dice chakra is the little push that doesn’t quite resolve, but instead teases. You’ve brought tension to the highest point you can alone. Your dice chakra turns it up to eleven, before allowing release. The reason your dice chakra is successful is that it’s out of your control. When you make the conscious decision to release those dice, you’ve said you’ve had all the tension your conscious mind can take. The dice chakra pushes just a little bit further. It elevates that tension beyond the conscious, into the spiritual.

Embrace your dice chakra.