Category: interactive fiction

Bissell, Braid, and the Use of Words

A colleague recently loaned me Tom Bissell’s Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter.

I knew it existed, but wasn’t planning to buy it immediately. Since I’ve been freelancing in the field, I’ve been focusing on books specifically about writing for games, rather than broader criticism.

This is a stodgy process, requiring self-discipline. There’s much I feel I need to know, but it’s often sandwiched in between things I consider too obvious to be worth saying and things I consider insanely wrongheaded.

The latest book on the pile is Lee Sheldon’s Character Development and Storytelling for Games, which is apparently designed for those game writers who have never written anything before and came in from some other part of the production team.

Sheldon’s book dutifully describes many, many basic aspects of story-building; offers an introductory view of plot structures for video games, while deftly avoiding any really hard problems or really interesting solutions; and takes care to remind the reader every few pages of Sheldon’s credentials not only as a professional writer but as the sort of person who has shared a limo with Dick Clark.

The prose is breezily good-natured and would not tax the vocabulary of a fourth-grader, but it gets through its material slowly, with many explanations per concept, so that it becomes boring in aggregate. It is the mental-nutrition equivalent of buttered macaroni. I don’t feel respected by this book, though it is probably fairest to say I am not its intended audience. If I were, I might find it a thorough, not-too-hard introduction to many of the core concepts of the craft.

Bissell’s book, therefore, was refreshing. For one thing, it’s very well-written, in the sense that individual sentences give pleasure. After reading a bit, I find my own writing turning into half-conscious, third-rate Bissell pastiche. This is annoying, but also a sure indicator of prose whose rhythm has got into my head like a hooky song.

Extra Lives is observant. It reads like the kind of travel narrative that is as much about the traveler’s inward journey as his outward one. It captures many of the things I find compelling about games as an expressive medium, and also identifies many of the aspects that are hard to defend. If you’re reading my blog because you’re interested in the problems of narrative/mechanic interface I often write about, then Extra Lives might well appeal to you.

It is pyrotechnic in its wording—I said it was well-written, not that it is modest, and I was not surprised by Amazon reviewers who said they had come to personally dislike the author on the basis of his narrative voice. That wasn’t my own reaction, but I can see where it comes from.

Anyway, here is a guy who turns such phrases as “ozonically scorched” to describe the atmosphere of a room after a disturbing presentation; “thermonuclear charisma” for a personality; “Bachelor Futurist” for a decor style. It is characteristic of Bissell to take an idea that would take most of us a prepositional phrase or a whole clause to express, and condense it to one adverb. If he has to invent that adverb himself, so much the better. Sharp observations in small spaces, that’s Bissell.

It is probably for this reason that Bissell’s chapter on Braid struck me so forcefully.

Continue reading “Bissell, Braid, and the Use of Words”

Choice as Threat

Then from out of the blue
And without any guide
You know what your decision is
Which is not to decide

This article talks about how players like to avoid making an irreversible decision.

This resonates with some things I’ve been working on lately: instead of presenting the player suddenly with a choice (even a choice that has a lot of emotional resonance built in), I’m trying to tantalize the player for a while with the idea that if they do everything right, they might be able to have their cake and eat it too. This ratchets up the tension as the player tries not to lose either of the two valued opportunities, and gives them a chance to think about which they would choose if they really had to.

Maybe when you get to the point, you do let the player have both things and not decide after all. Or maybe you gradually make it harder and harder to balance the two, so it becomes clear that a decision is going to be absolutely required after all.

Either way, the player gets to see the choice coming, and the agonizing over it becomes part of the PC’s characterization; it’s a deeper part of the story, not something you can save-restore out of significance.

Anyone else playing with this pattern?

Glulx Entry Points version 8 troubleshooting

Because I’ve gotten a couple of emails about this now:

The latest version of Glulx Entry Points is version 8. That is the version included inside the Inform package, if you download the latest Inform.

There are other dependent extensions (such as my Graphical Window extension and the related Location Images extension) that require at least Glulx Entry Points version 7. If you include one of those dependent extensions and compile, you may get a problem message saying that you require Glulx Entry Points version 7. (Version 8 will do for this purpose; it just won’t accept anything *earlier* than version 7.)

If you get that message:
— make sure you have the latest version of Inform, which has version 8 of Glulx Entry Points;
— make sure that you are not overriding this extension. You might have an older version of GEP installed in your user extension folder, in which case Inform will look there first. This is not a bug: we want authors to be able to use older extension versions if they need to for compatibility on legacy projects. But it does mean that if you have, say, GEP v6 installed in your user folder, Inform will find that first, in preference to the version 8 extension included in the package. If you remove or delete that version of the extension, Inform will be able to find v8 again.

Here ends the public service announcement.