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Love Stories for High-XP Characters

Scully “I’m here.”

It’s the fourth episode of the new revived X-Files season. Scully is keeping a sad vigil in a DC hospital. Mulder has been in Philadelphia working on a series of vividly gruesome murders. But he drops that and goes to the hospital and calls her from outside the ward and says just “I’m here.” — but it calls back all the times he was there for her before, and all the times he wasn’t, and it’s one more move in a very long game.

This is a couple that had one of the longest, most artificial Unresolved Sexual Tension arcs in television history, including multiple fake-outs from unrepentant writers. They kissed but it was only a dream. They kissed but it was a hallucination. They kissed (or nearly so) but one of them was really a shape-shifter or possessed/body-swapped by another entity. (That one happened multiple times.) They were about to kiss but one of them was coincidentally just at that exact moment stung by a hybridized bee carrying an instantly-debilitating alien virus.

And just when, as a couple, they were finally moving past that, Duchovny left the show, so Mulder and Scully’s relationship went into another kind of limbo where they never saw one another.

Then there was the second X-Files movie, of which defiantly I liked the first half. No one else liked any of it, as far as I can tell. The movie skipped any further will-they-won’t-they shenanigans and went straight ahead to Mulder and Scully as long-term cohabiting partners. And now, in the new series, they’ve come through partnership and lust and mortal peril and a child they had to give up, through living together and then not living together. They are in another place now, a place that television rarely visits and where video games pretty much never go at all.

If you’re thinking that this doesn’t sound like a very well constructed show, I hear you. The writers have quite a bit to answer for, and I haven’t even gotten into how silly and inconsistent the main plot arc is. But back in the day, I used to watch it because I found Scully riveting, especially after the first couple of seasons when she stops seeming quite so nervous to prove herself. In her self-containment and determination, I saw a rare model of how to be a professional adult woman with a partially technical job. She wasn’t a Stone-Cold Female Executive, and she wasn’t defeminized or dehumanized by her nerdy knowledge. She also wasn’t doing all the emotional labor, bringing brownies to the FBI building or listening to the woes of other agents. She had connections and relatives and feelings, but also boundaries and agency and ethics. She could perform femininity but she didn’t seem to be trapped by it. And for all the tension with Mulder, for all the times she was in mortal peril, she was never, ever just the girlfriend or woman-in-a-fridge or a prize for anyone. She seemed lonely — I always wanted a larger community than Scully seemed to have. But in a lot of other respects, when I pictured what I wanted for my future self, I pictured Scully’s assurance, her absolute competence, her combination of empathy and self-preservation.

Now that she’s older and I’m older too, she’s even more of a rarity on TV: a woman who is allowed to be, and appear to be, over 35; a woman with a functioning and evolving professional life; a woman in a relationship with strata.

She and Mulder together have a relationship that is similarly uncommon, a relationship that is not about young love or bodies in their 20s but also not a cutely condescending Denny’s-ad caricature of elderly lovers.

And as so often when starving for a certain kind of story or a certain kind of representation, I’m willing to forgive flaws (perhaps a lot of flaws) in order to hear this story at all.

Continue reading “Love Stories for High-XP Characters”

Lunation Series (JJ Gadd)

Disclosure: this review is part of the IF Comp review exchange. J.J. Gadd was kind enough to review Cat Manning’s Crossroads, and to supply me with copies of her Lunation series for review.

Lunation is a five-book series about a fantasy land in which, five hundred years before the beginning of Book 1, the moon was magically constructed as a prison for the queen Marama. In the present day, her descendants include a yellow-eyed boy with powers of sorcery who dreams (literally) of finding a way to free her. He soon meets up with a young female relative who is able to see the future by gazing into smoke and then, trance-like, weaving or embroidering an image that represents what she saw.

The first three books in the series are technically CYOA-structured, though in the very lightest sense: book 1 contains no branches until chapter 6, when you can pick which of two characters to follow, into 6A or 6B; at the end of 6A, you’re invited to read 6B as well if you’re interested. Book 2 works similarly, with a few sections following each of the two main characters. Book 3 jumps backward to tell the story of Marama herself: the “initiation journey” in which she is cast out of the castle where she grew up in order to familiarize herself with her people. In Book 4 (diagrammed), we reach the point where all the characters so far are reunited — Marama, now released from the moon, joins the fight of her descendants 500 years later. And at this point the structure becomes slightly more complicated than before, though it is still a matter of choosing which character we most wish to follow. Book 5 is roughly similar in complexity to Book 4.

Compared to something like Arcadia, the which-character-to-follow? choice structure in the Lunation series is still tightly constrained. Sometimes we have an option of which chapter to read first out of a set of two or three parallel adventures, but the tracks soon rejoin; there isn’t the dizzying sense of having to piece together the mysteries of the narrative ourselves from numerous complicated components. Instead, in Lunation, this feels like an attempt to mediate for the volume of text: to let the reader choose favorite elements of a story that perhaps runs long, but that is too dear for the author to let any of it go.

Continue reading “Lunation Series (JJ Gadd)”

Readerly Experiments in Narrative Form

Sometimes people write to me asking for suggested lists of interactive fiction that fit particular criteria. When that happens, I like to publish the results to my blog rather than just answer by email — both in order to establish a resource for other people in the future, and in case commenters here have additional thoughts that might be useful.

Yesterday I was on a panel that included Richard Beard. He is an author of novels (including the OuLiPian Damascus, which constrained itself to use no words not in a specific issue of the Times) and nonfiction, as well as a contributor to PAPERCUT, an enhanced ebook app. Today he wrote to me for suggested IF — perhaps prompted by my vehement assertion during the panel that there’s lots of interactive fiction that is not simply an enhancement of a pre-existing static text:

I’m particularly interested in any experience that is excitingly different from reading a book, but still recognisable as reading (rather than, say, wordy gaming). This would seem to mean experiments with narrative, with new ways of enfolding form and content and new ways of enlivening conventional storytelling techniques.

“Recognisable as reading rather than wordy gaming” seems to me to exclude parser-based works, since those require typed input: probably not a “reading” activity. Otherwise I would include last year’s Map and Midnight. Swordfight., both of which are certainly experimenting with allowing a plot to be radically reshaped (but within a predictable system) by the reader’s actions. I’d also mention Analogue: A Hate Story for its compelling use of a database narrative structure; Lime Ergot for evoking the reader’s curiosity and telling its story through telescoping descriptions; What Fuwa Bansaku Found for its reweaving of translated Japanese poetry into a new story. Alethicorp‘s storytelling via a faux corporate website probably also includes too many non-reading actions.

The request suggests that the writer might not be looking for something like 80 Days, which — though very much an experiment in narrative and remixable vignettes — bears enough game markers in terms of scores and goals that it might be off-putting to a readerly audience. Anything from StoryNexus is probably off the table, thanks to the card metaphor and overt mechanics. The emphasis on reading would also seem to exclude interactive film, interactive audio, and interactive comics.

Even the Choice of Games catalog — though almost purely textual — might seem too game-like, given that there are success and failure possibilities and some stats-tracking is expected if you want to get the best outcome. (Otherwise, as a first taste of CoG for someone interested in readerly merits, my picks would be The City’s Thirst for general prose quality and imagery, and Slammed! for its investment in its character arcs.)

And given the desire to actually try the works in question, I unfortunately also cannot suggest anything from the Versu project, since those apps are now unavailable.

So now that I’ve eliminated many many honorable mentions:

Continue reading “Readerly Experiments in Narrative Form”

Incommensurate Wages

One of the sources that influenced The Frequently Deceased is this essay about the lot of maids and nannies in Victorian households, written by a contemporary reformer. It’s longwinded, in Victorian style, but one of the key bits is this:

Money is assumed to confer more than the mere power to buy the time and labour which others have to sell. It is assumed to buy the whole being–liberty, affection, mind, freewill, and creed.

And this also:

Even in the case of a nurse who stands nearest to the family, and who has to give more than mere time and professional deftness–a loving care that wages cannot buy nor repay–if she is to the mind of her mistress she is kept during the baby years when she is wanted, but no sooner is the nursery empty than she is found superfluous and dismissed… With what conscience then can we demand, as we do, energies, devotion, self-sacrifice beyond the stipulated tale of tasks, when we give on our side absolutely nothing but the bare bones of our enforced obligations?

Loyalty can’t effectively be measured, or bought—or, for that matter, sold, even if one has run out of other things to sell. If you want a servant motivated by something other than money, you’re probably going to have to pay in some other currency, too. But in a place like Fallen London, someone would be very likely to try anyway, using their own perverse metrics.

(The Frequently Deceased is turning out to be a favorite on the Fallen London forums — if you are interested in playing, an Exceptional Friendship subscription for a month is a better deal than buying the story several months from now as a stand-alone unlock.)

February Link Assortment

Upcoming events:

We’ve got a range of things happening in the Oxford/London Meetup: there’s a talk in Oxford on Iain Pears’ Arcadia, including me as a panelist, March 2, as well as meets in Oxford April 3, and in London April 19.

Spring Thing is happening again this year, and you still have until March 8 to submit an intent if you want to enter. Spring Thing is a counterweight to the big yearly IF Comp, and can be a gentler way of getting your work out there.

A particularly cool innovation: as of last year, Spring Thing’s Back Garden division accepts works that the author doesn’t want to put into the main ranked competition. It’s a good place to share excerpts, unfinished work that you still think might interest someone, and experiments where you’d like feedback. (This is where/how I released Aspel last year, and that proved to be a good experience.)

Laura Hudson talks to Sean Vanaman about dialogue modeling in Firewatch, and writes more generally about how Firewatch is drawing on inspirations from text-based games, including Infocom but also 80 Days and Lifeline. The dialogue model from Valve that they refer to is the Left 4 Dead model that Elan Ruskin talked about at GDC a few years back. Note the “Prior Art: Inform 7” slide partway through that talk.

Here’s Naomi Alderman’s interactive documentary about interactive fiction, RPGs, and related forms, executed in Twine with overlaid audio interview snippets. (Quite possibly including some from me: I haven’t explored it fully yet, but was interviewed as part of this project.)

Carolyn VanEseltine writes about the idea of cover songs as applied to IF.

Cat Manning (Invasion, Crossroads) with a list of Twine games that demonstrate some of the possibilities of the field.

Haywire Magazine on why 2015 was the year of IF.

For those who liked my post on being edited this month, here’s a GDC Vault presentation from Cameron Harris of BioWare, on what editing is for and why games need editors.

Here’s a Guardian article about several interesting IF/ebook projects. The article mentions Editions at Play, teamed up with Google Creative Lab. Wired also has a take on this development.

Here’s an article on video game curation for museum and shared spaces, such as No Quarter, Wild Rumpus, and other live displays.

NaNoRenO is a month-long jam for visual novels, especially those in Ren’Py, which is running through March. If you’ve ever wanted to try your hand at this but not gotten off the ground, now is your chance.

The Electronic Literature Collection volume 3 is now available; it includes First Draft of the Revolution, I’m happy to say, as well as With Those We Love Alive, The Hunt for the Gay Planet, Quing’s Quest VII, Dwarf Fortress, and many other fine things.

Failbetter Games has announced Fundbetter, an investment scheme for narrative games and interactive fiction offering amounts in the range of £2000-£20,000. If you have a project you think could benefit from their investment attentions, have a look.

Vice covers Rob Swigart’s Portal (Activision, 1986); Jimmy Maher has also written in quite a bit of depth about this piece over at Digital Antiquarian. I haven’t had a chance to play it, but a quote from the Vice article –

True to his name, Homer is a story telling AI, with only fragments of his memory intact and a desperate desire to unravel the past. Homer becomes your invaluable ally in the search for the truth. He digs through the system, unlocking new data that you must go through, and with each new file uncovered, Homer begins constructing the story of how the world ended.

– made me think of Ice-Bound, which is freshly out.

Stout Games has announced Cheongsam, an AI-driven interaction with a character who responds to your gestural input. It sounds vaguely Façade-like, though it’s early days yet; I’ll be curious to see what comes of this project.

Midnight Stranger was a 1994 FMV game with an interesting control scheme where you could indicate your response to events along an axis rather than with discreet choices. (So maybe a little like The Act, except that as far as I can tell from the description you’re doing this at specific choice moments rather than providing continuous realtime input.) There is now a Kickstarter to make it playable again on current technology. I’m not sure whether it’s likely to be good, but it certainly sounds interesting.

Speaking of Kickstarter, there’s one to distribute the movie about the making of That Dragon, Cancer.

IF author Christopher Huang (Muse, An Act of Murder, Cana According to Micah, Sunday Afternoon) is writing (has written?) a classic-style murder mystery, which is now gaining followers and possible backers on inkshares.

Mattie Brice writes about Style Savvy: Trendsetters in a piece on aesthetic gameplay.

Imaginary Game Jam

Imaginary Game Jam is an IF community project, run by Jason Dyer, in which participants first contributed reviews of imaginary, perhaps unwrite-able games — in some cases games that plainly require technology we don’t have, or belong to a universe we don’t live in. These reviews were swapped, and then people wrote… something… to correspond with an imaginary game review they’d received.

Structurally this is a bit like ShuffleComps 1 and 2, in which authors wrote games around tracks of music selected by other participants — only way weirder. Sam Ashwell’s game reviews from Tlön were an inspiration here — indeed, one of those reviews (Fire Next Time) was submitted and used in this jam. (See also Speed-IF Jacket for a shorter, less serious take on this idea; for the reason why these posts refer to “Tlön”, see Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.)

The games created for the Imaginary Game Jam have now been released, along with the reviews that inspired them. They are fairly extraordinary. Continue reading “Imaginary Game Jam”