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4 ways to adapt the Handforth Parish Council to video gamesYOU HAVE NO AUTHORITY HERE, JACKIE WEAVER!
YOU HAVE NO AUTHORITY HERE, JACKIE WEAVER!
If you somehow don’t already know about Handforth Parish Council, then it brings me great pleasure to be the one to bring you up to speed. The story is this: in the UK county of Cheshire, there is a place called Handforth, whose local governing body has gone completely berserk. It seems a man named Brian is doing his level best to elevate himself to the status of a tyrant in this village of 6,000 people, and has chosen to pursue this ambition from his seat as chairman of the parish council.
The whole story plays out so elegantly, in this YouTube upload of a meeting from last month, that it’s staggering to remember it wasn’t scripted. All of human life is here: there’s roaring, there’s banishments, there’s an impassioned paraphrasing of Gandalf, and there’s a bit where a man loses his mind and growl-hisses “we’re trying to have a Teams meeting you fool” to someone off-camera. There are even accidental opening credits. If you’ve not watched it yet, drop everything and do so, and then I will tell you how this remarkable story should be adapted for the world of videogames.
Best of the Handforth Parish Council Planning & Environment Committee Thursday 10th December 2020Watch on YouTube
Best of the Handforth Parish Council Planning & Environment Committee Thursday 10th December 2020
(above is an edited highlights reel but the full hour-and-a-bit long video is availablehere, and it is from here that I sourced the images below.)
AReturn Of The Obra Dinn-style mystery-unravelling game
At the start of the Handforth Parish Council meeting video, it’s unclear exactly what has happened - only that people are extremely upset about it. The plot is delivered in perfect, retrospective packages over the eighty minutes of footage, however, and what’s staggering is how many of the clues turn out to have been hidden in plain sight all along. The text over Brian’s webcam footage, identifying him as the parish council’s Clerk, seems so unobtrusive at first, but turns out to be pivotal. It all feels like great fodder for a mystery game, and there’s even a baked-in protagonist in the form of Jackie Weaver, an outsider to the council who has been sent there to get to the bottom of the chaos. She becomes Brian’s chief adversary in the video, and is widely considered to be the “hero” of the story, so it seems right that she should be the player character, too.
A piece ofCrusader Kings 3 DLC
This is John Smith, the level-headed soul who soldiers on as acting chair of the meeting after Jackie banishes an increasingly furious Brian. I have some measure of quiet respect for John Smith.
AnAce Attorney-esque courtroom game.
One of the most memorable supporting characters in HPC: Endgame is Aled Brewerton, a self-employed solicitor and private investigator who acts as Brian’s main acolyte in the developing conflict. He’s reminiscent of Grima Wormtongue off of Lord Of The Rings in his fervent support for Brian/Saruman, and one of the greatest moments in the meeting comes about when he starts barking about Subpoenas for reasons that possibly only make sense within the context of his own mind. I’ve not actually played an Ace Attorney game, but my understanding is that they boil down to shouting the word “objection” in a way that loosely corresponds to actual courtroom practice, and that seems very much an Aleddian sort of thing to do.
Aled, just visible to the left of this image, only ever appears on the edge of his screen, like some sort of entity haunting a liminal space. Like all good movie monsters he is more often heard than seen, and whenever the meeting cuts to his webcam, we more often find ourselves gazing up at the cyclopean immensity of the Laughing Man, as he looms over the camera like a brachiosaurus.
An arcade 1v1 fighting game
No genre of game sums up the essence of personal human conflict more directly than your good old time-tested arcade fighting game, and I’m struggling to think of a reason why the format wouldn’t lend itself to the Handforth Parish Council Cinematic Universe. You need a roster of eight characters at least to give players some variety, and that’s exactly what HPC provides - especially if you become a superfan, as my partner and I have done, and begin watching older episodes of meetings. You’ve got Jackie and Brian and Aled of course. Then you’ve got the incredibly sinister bloke who sits on Aled’s sofa, roaring with laughter like an ogre who’s just eaten a whole church congregation, and the faintly wizardly man with a pointed goatee and guitars hanging behind him. Round out the roster with the terse mayor Barry in his cupboard full of paintings, the forlorn, stalwart Cyn, and the stoic figure of John Smith, and you’ve one heck of a stew going.
