Ludonarrative Puppets, Sandwiches, and AI
Ludonarrative Puppets, Sandwiches, and AI
There’s a moment in every tabletop RPG session where the fiction cracks. Someone spills the soda. A phone buzzes. The GM fumbles for a rule they half-remember. The player behind the elven ranger is suddenly, undeniably, just Dave from accounting making a badly funny voice.
Tables don’t “tolerate” this or “gloss over it”. Often quite explicitly, it’s part of the fun. However, most games paper over it. “Ignore the man behind the curtain!”
The social contract admits the illusion, but the formalism (if TTRPG text can be so construed) demands we maintain the illusion. We pretend the character has agency, that the dice reveal fate rather than probability, that the story emerges rather than being constructed in real-time by people who are also thinking about how many calories are in this damn bowl of chips.
Hand In Your Puppet (HIYP) gleefully refuses to paper over anything.
In HIYP, you play Fuppets: self-aware puppets who know they are animated by giant meat-things with opinions. Every player puts an actual puppet (or sock, or napkin, or hoodie sleeve) on their hand. Everyone can see everyone’s Hands. There is no illusion. There never was.
This is not a gimmick. It’s the entire point.
The Fuppets of Yarnia live in a world where “the laws of reality were dragged behind a truck sometime during the Great Unraveling and never quite recovered.” Time hiccups. Causality shrugs. Doors have personalities. The Fuppets know this is stupid. They say so, constantly, to the Fourth Wall, to the ceiling, to anyone except the thing they’re supposed to be talking to.
This is called Heckling, and it’s how Fuppets survive.
In a nutshell, the core mechanic is perversity. When a Fuppet tries to do something, they don’t roll dice. They perform. A joke, a rant, a bit, an awkward monologue… and the other players secretly vote with tokens on how much “strain reality absorbs.” Low votes mean “failure”.
Here’s the twist: failure gives you tokens. Failure gives you the spotlight. Failure gives you something to say.
The game text is explicit: Trying sincerely is dangerous. Missing the point confidently is rewarded.
This isn’t cruelty, but rather, philosophical honesty. The Fuppets aren’t heroes on a quest. Never were. They’re aware beings trapped in a performance, and their only power is commentary. Every failure is another chance to Heckle, to say the quiet part loud, to acknowledge how doomed this all feels.
Once per session, a Fuppet can declare Independence. They announce, with conviction: “Yoouuuu, you damn hand, YOU’RE NOT IN CHARGE HERE! I AM! I’m rolling the dice of fate!”
And then something terrible happens.
The Hand (the human player) loses all agency. A d6 determines what they must do: pratfall, love confession, villain monologue, interpretive dance, crisis of faith, musical number. No negotiation. No mitigation. No clever escape.
After the forced performance, the Fuppet must narrate how, whatever the d6 outcome was, THIS was their intention all along.
The game asks: “Who’s the puppet now?” The exquisite irony is laid bare:
- The Fuppet declares freedom
- The Hand loses agency
- Randomness takes command
- Everyone pretends this makes sense
Independence, the ultimate assertion of autonomy, results in the player being controlled? NO ONE is in charge? The Fuppet’s free will is revealed as a costume change, not an escape. The Hand that was always visible becomes, briefly, the one being manipulated.
I’m biased, since I wrote it, but here’s my favorite bit in the entire game: Fuppets love to eat sandwiches.
But. Well. They don’t have digestive systems. So that makes eating pret-ty weird. Consumption serves no biological function. But they get so hungry anyway.
One of the example “adventures” is simply: “A sandwich shop that won’t admit it’s out of bread.”
The Fuppets eat because eating is what you do. The hunger is real even though the digestion is non-existent. The performance of consumption continues despite the lack of any actual metabolic need.
Most discussions of “ludonarrative dissonance” focus on the gap between what a game’s story says and what its mechanics reward. Nathan Drake is a charming everyman in cutscenes and a mass murderer in gameplay. The game tells you one thing; the systems tell you another.
HIYP has no dissonance because the mechanics are the theme. You can’t separate what the game is about from what you do while playing it.
Heckling isn’t flavor. It’s the survival mechanism. Failure isn’t punishment. It’s fuel. Independence isn’t freedom. It’s loss of agency. The visible Hands aren’t a gimmick. They’re the truth that other games hide.
The consonance is total. There’s no gap between the fiction and the system because the fiction is about the system. The Fuppets know they’re in a game. The game knows they know. Everyone proceeds with full awareness that the performance is a performance.
The game’s tagline is: “This is a game about the hilarious tragedy of consciousness and the only freedom left: laughing at it loudly enough that it hurts.”
What makes HIYP work (what makes it more than a comedy game with a puppetry gimmick) is that it takes this seriously. The laughter isn’t denial. It’s acknowledgment. The Heckles aren’t complaints. They’re the exercise of the only real agency available: the ability to comment on the situation you can’t escape.
The Fuppets can’t remove the Hand. They can’t rewrite the world. They can’t even digest a sandwich. But they can say, out loud, to anyone listening, “Ermargerd, this is stupid and I know it.”
That’s not nothing. Anyhow, it’s all we’ve got. So. That.
Enjoy the Chaos Magick.
If you haven’t figured out how this essay is about AI, Rosenhand and Fuppetstern are very sorry to have disappointed you.