My Body is a Cage RPG

By day, life is ordinary. You go to school and learn things you don’t care about. You earn money working at a job you hate. Some days are good. Most days suck. By night, you delve into bizarre dungeons. If you’re lucky, you’ll wake up a little bit richer. If you’re unlucky, you won’t wake up.That’s your life in John Battle’s My Body is a Cage. In this RPG, player characters lead dual lives. They must endure the mundane travails of the waking world, but they must also the survive the fantastic—but very real—hazards that populate their dreams. My Body is a Cage uses dream as a metaphor to embed the act of playing an RPG within an RPG. But this game is far from ethereal. It uses physical materials to provide players a concrete, kinesthetic experience. It collapses and combines multiple functions into those materials, making an elegant but still complex and challenging system. And in the process, it points back at gamers and some of the reasons we play. The Book Printed on 11″ x 8.5″ pages in landscape orientation, My Body is a Cage resembles a children’s picture book more than it does your typical RPG rulebook—but not in a bad way. This material choice serves two crucial functions. First, it establishes a nostalgia that bolsters the escapist motif. Imaginative experiences—whether in books, movies, or games—help to distract from our daily woes, and the physical format recalls a time in our lives when we had significantly fewer of those. Simultaneously, it also emphasizes through contrast the persistent mundane struggles that the game incorporates mechanically and as narrative devices. Second, the physical presentation prompts readers to pay attention to the book’s visual dimension, and My Body is a Cage doesn’t disappoint. Every single layout is radically distinctive (including the presentations of the ready-to-play dungeons by Alex Damanceno, Ema Acosta, Jim Gies, Josh Domanski, Maria Mison, Nevyn Holmes, and Julie- Anne Muñoz), and some of the avant-garde strategies force the reader to slow down and engage more with the book itself in the process of absorbing its content.