Feb 4

Feb 4 Review | Roller Drama - Wheels Spinning

Roller Drama is Open-Lab's studio follow-up to their previous title, Football Drama an almost tabletop game execution of the rules of football, managed through a type of standard narrative fair about ticking boxes to increase relationships, managing stress levels and fatigue in and off of the field and trying to get by under the throes of a totalitarian government.

Girls nights out spent inside are the best.

Now I know nothing about Roller Derby. I missed the craze of my youth; the two local roller derby teams we seemed to have nearby were both retired by the time anyone in my age group could pick up a pair of skates; and it's always been The Forbidden Sport. Not because it was closed off to people born like I was (it's not!) but because I have never seen the game played outside of fiction. I had to do research on it to do this review, almost more than I spent time playing Roller Drama.

I only know what Roller Derby feels like in movies and TV shows, comic books. Roller Drama centres itself on being about the girls, but undercuts itself by saying that it's first and foremost a work of satire. Sports stories tend to be more interesting when played straight: the allure of the old Vince Vaughn vehicle Dodgeball is that the ludicrous premise still completely sticks to the same formulas of dozens of sports movies before it.

Unfortunately - whatever there is to see behind Roller Derby is locked behind a sport played like chess that's meant to be played like boxing. The physical rhythms of Roller Derby involve player positions constantly changing with the rhythm and clock of the game - Roller Drama is instead played like a race abstracted into small moments where your piece moves through denser pieces. You can hit, and you can dodge, but the violence needed to be shown here doesn't come through - there's no feedback, and there is no weight or push or pull to the hits. Calling attacks is like playing cards on a board. There's no sweat in this abstraction that's not counted on a Fatigue Gauge.

What if we **just** hung out and chatted tonight?

I wanted to get to know the Girls because Roller Drama charms with its art and mood. Purple hues and warm bedroom lights tell you who's available and ready to talk. The cast is gorgeously drawn with digital brushes that look like charcoal and watercolour and oh god damnit I might as well say it: there was this nagging feeling through the first two derby matches here that I wished I was reading a comic book or watching a cartoon instead, anything to see underneath the packaging of the sport that desperately wanted to shine through for me but couldn't.

Should the scrapes and bruises feel like cards played on a wooden table? Is that version of roller derby fun if there's not another person sitting across from me? Playing the matches and watching my would-be team turn into anonymous tokens that move in fixed positions; I want to see them carry bruises in day-to-day life, see them fall on the ground and get back up again. Instead, I settle for one of my teammates arbitrarily being knocked out of bounds and slowly having to watch the pieces reset and re-assemble on the board.