The Rare Spoiler-Free Experience

I was recently invited to join a group playing the Pen&Paper game "Freude schöner Götterfunken" - a campaign using the "Icarus" rule system and set in the first world war, where my character Helmut has just arrived at the front line about a week before the first session I joined. That was all I knew going into it - WW1, the Icarus rules (at least the half of it that I managed to read in time) and my character’s backstory. And so I, alongside Helmut, was thrown in, joining my comrade Hanni in watching from the outside as russians attacked a castle her friends were (presumably) in. About maybe two hours in, the first bit of combat that happened in Helmut’s presence didn’t involve him nor Hanni, though: A russian tried to ambush us, but right when Hanni noticed him, he was taken out and carried away by the claws of some shadowy creature that then immediately turned away and left.

At this point, I assumed the attacker was a bear and we somehow got lucky - an impression quickly shattered when Hanni turned her flashlight onto the creature and it turned out to be some dark monster with an odd amount of legs and wings, nothing that’d ever exist in nature. Pained by the light, it jumped into the nearest stream of water, which the others would later have to cross to join us. And alas, when they made it out of the castle and to the stream, another monster similarly unnatural and weird emerged, making us watch in horror as it sunk its spider-like legs into Hanni and devoured her\*.

Before this moment, before the monsters showed up and killed the only character Helmut knew, neither him nor me had any idea that this would be anything but a realistic WW1 scenario. Being entirely blindsided by this supernatural encounter (and future ones to come, although both Helmut and I started to expect the weird stuff once we at least somewhat processed what happened) made for an extremely immersive moment that I just... Haven’t had before. Like Helmut, I was suddenly faced with something entirely unexpected that I did not at all understand, and it was a great experience as a player.

Let’s juxtapose that with my first time playing through the Half-Life series, which was about a year ago. I never looked into the series too much before then, hadn’t watched any Let’s Plays or anything along those lines, but still knew some of what was to come from references and mentions of it in semi-related media. I knew that Headcrabs and Barnacles existed, I had heard of the Combine, I had listened to Cave Johnson rant about Black Mesa before. So when I pushed that tray into the anti-mass spectrometer, when the resonance cascade happened and I got the scene of Vortigaunts looking at me, when I booked it out of the test chamber and saw my first headcrab, I wasn’t nearly as blindsided. I’d seen these before, I knew what to expect, I wasn’t nearly as immersed.

Or, an even better example: When I was a child, Star Wars (along with Harry Potter) was the biggest thing in my neighbourhood. My older neighbours would borrow my parents’ Star Wars DVDs, we’d play lightsaber battles with sticks of wood (obviously all acting as our favourite characters) and I saw most of what the original and prequel trilogy had to offer in LEGO catalogues years before I’d be allowed to watch the movies. Later, I’d hear people who lived when the original trilogy came out talk about what a plot twist and a shocker the "I am your father" scene was and couldn’t at all relate - I knew about it way before seeing the movies, because everyone and their mother references it all over the place. I remember a video essay mentioning how before the prequels, things like "the clone wars" and "the jedi order" would be mythical bits of lore you’d speculate about at best. Again, my experience was that by the time I’d be allowed to watch A New Hope, I already knew all the characters and the rough outline of what happened, so this whole effect of mystery was entirely lost on me.

Try to think back to the last time you’ve experienced some piece of media completely spoiler-free. And I don’t mean "only a rough outline" spoiler free - I mean knowing nothing other than maybe the rough initial setting going into it. Playing Portal and only knowing that you’re going to be in some futuristic science lab. Reading Lord Of The Rings and only knowing that it’s about some hobbit in his hobbit home (I think, I haven’t actually read it yet, please don’t kill me). Watching Star Wars and only knowing it’s about some kid living on a sand planet.

I think the closest I can get would be Stray - and even then, I knew I was going to be in some cyberpunky world ahead of time. Thinking about it, it might be near impossible to avoid these kinds of basic spoilers before going into a game or story - when picking something to spend your time with, you’re bound to see its advertising, and obviously Harry Potter isn’t going to advertise itself by saying it’s "about a kid who lives in a closet at his aunt’s and also his aunt and uncle hate him". So I think a case like my initial example is really rare, if it happens at all. But how did it happen?

First of all, I didn’t pick out the game/campaign myself. Our GM did and I was invited to join months after he chose it (and the others agreed to it, presumably). So there were no spoilers from having to pick it out. Also, FsG is a rather obscure campaign - Most people who haven’t looked into PnP games all that much will know DnD at best, maybe they’ll even have heard of Baldur’s Gate. By comparison, FsG and the Icarus system are not commonly known things in our cultural canon, so there were no spoilers from general references like there are for well known series like Star Wars.

An interesting question now would be how to reproduce this kind of thing, how to get a fully spoiler-free experience. Obviously, you’d need to have movies/games picked out for you by someone else who knows you well and shares a similar taste with you (so they know what you’ll like), and they cannot tell you anything about it beforehand (other than the initial setting). They also can’t be anything famous enough for you to have picked up spoilers from references like I did with Half-Life. This might be a somewhat hard system to enfore, and it probably still won’t have the same blindsiding effect that expecting something entirely different had, but I assume it’s worth a shot - maybe at some point I’ll try it and make an update post about how it went.

\* For the record, this wasn’t our GM just randomly killing someone off - Hanni’s player was moving out of town and thus wouldn’t be able to join future sessions, so he wanted to give her a satisfying death, and he sure as hell did.