Goblin Mercantile Exchange

In Taos for the Rio Hondo workshop, where Kristin and I have been having quite the blast. Building small cairns inside hollowed out logs, approaching steep waterfalls, watching blizzards fall, fiction, Fat Tire, friends new and old. Back on Sunday, and then–Wiscon…where I’ll probably see 80% of you.

Trying to place what can be placed with my writing inside of my own head, and letting go what I can’t. I don’t quite know what that means, yet.

Many times have I started writing this. My iBook is gimped and I still haven’t figured out comments on this fucking blog. It kind of dampens the “exchange” part of this exchange. You have to register on this site to comment, which I want no one to have to do. I can’t find the right toggle, and I don’t have the wherewithal on aforementioned gimped computer to upgrade the Wordpress. It’s a holding pattern. And on the other hand, it doesn’t really matter. My cell phone is 3 years old too–I need a new one (the pause in the words appearing after my hands hit the keys…that is the creaking machinery, I see it); omg it’s hard work keeping up…up with being relentless! I could use those things but I don’t need them. No one’s starving here.

In other news, God hates our coffeemaker. The….what is it called? Beaker? Beaker shattered when Kristin dropped it, and then a few days later one of the cats went on the stove, toggled one of the burners to ON, and the cord of the coffeemaker also went ON, as in, caught on fire, which spread to the coffeemaker. 2 foot high flames ensued and Kristin was quick and calm and put it out (foam everywhere for a few days…still everywhere, really, in the nooks). That was at 11:30 at night about a week ago, we were very lucky because Kristin was out earlier and I was asleep. She just happened to be at home and not asleep at a very odd time of the day. So it might have been very very bad. God 1, coffeemaker 0.

Whirring and stalling, whirring and stalling…

Oh this frustration–when “it just has to work!” Oh, this frustration is so…damn frustrating!

Time to drown ourselves in gadgetry.

I just came across this nugget from the Wilderness Survival Guide (AD&D, 1st ed., p. 103, don’t ask):

But if you create a world where “mountains” are made of wood (for instance), your players are going to ask questions and you’re going to have some explaining to do: Are these wooden mountains slippery? Do they burn? Can the characters get splinters if they’re not careful?

To which I say, yes, yes, and yes!!!!

*
I think I figured it out.

One of my favorite gaming blogs is The Stack. Reading his posts on Final Fantasy V really sold me on playing it, which was a hundred times more to my taste than the rigid, overrated Final Fantasy VI (sorry, I know that’s heresy, but…). Level grinding is one of the few things you can do when you’re sick. More on Final Fantasy V and identity later perhaps…

Anyway, the next game on the Stack’s docket is a really intriguing port of an old Dreamcast game called Typing of the Dead. Which is, yes, a touch-typing instruction game overlayed into the horror shooter genre:

The genius of this is that it naturally encourages touch-typing: you don’t dare look down at the keyboard when there are zombies shambling toward you, and there are as many in-game motivations to type quickly and accurately as there are to shoot quickly and accurately in the original game.

And instead of guns, everyone has keyboards strapped to their backs. Wicked!

Even more on space opera, a follow up to the follow up, on io9.

I’ve moved from the flu to bronchitis. I’m slowly getting better…I think?

Anyway, SF Signal convened a roundtable about space opera, using my Rain Taxi review of the New Space Opera as the launching point…it includes some of the authors in the anthology and some other practictioners of space opera, and a few rambly follow-up comments by me. Take a look-see.

1. I have the flu.

2. Our dog and Kelly have a really interesting relationship. He’s freaked out by her at first, yes, but then, when he doesn’t have her in sight for more than 10 minutes, forgets everything and starts barking again!. He is the Memento Dog!

3. Despite my flu I had a great time at Southwest Minnesota State University with Kelly and Dave. They both read some smashing stuff and the whole writing community at the university were such great hosts.

4. Bird Island has no birds. Or an island. But it does have a helpful website explaining why:

Many years ago about one and a half miles southwest of Bird Island there was a 60 acre island surrounded by sloughs. The island was filled with many huge, beautiful trees, that were a refuge for thousands of birds.

With the help of ditches and tile the island soon disappeared. Now it has become valuable productive farmland.

I know it’s one thing to note the past history of farmers hungry for arable land. But, in
2008, the “yay ditches! Destroying one-of-a-kind bird habitat!” tone just baffles me.

5. I like having a day job that lets me copyedit in bed, surrounded by fluids and tissues.

6. [sic]

As we announced a little while ago, those of us behind the Rabid Transit chapbooks decided to switch our focus to publishing a line of novellas with the same standards of quality and innovation. We are pleased (with our rechristened press, Rabid Transit Press) to announce the debut volume of the Electrum Novella Series–The Sun Inside, by Dave Schwartz. It’s truly a stunner of a novella to begin with–bringing in pulp traditions and seamlessly integrating them with contemporary concerns of wartime and love. It’s a grand adventure and also a searing character study. We’re really, really pleased to publish it because it rocks.

It’s available for pre-order now: $9, and that includes free shipping. And keep a keen eye out for Dave’s novel Superpowers, out in June from Three Rivers Press!

I’m really pleased to say that Deadline Enchanter was a finalist for three XYZZY Awards–for Best Writing, Best Story, and Best Use of Medium–and won the XYZZY for the latter. Needless to say–considering I’m decidedly Not a Programmer, to find an audience for any of my game-creation endeavours is a giant thrill. I’m really appreciative of everyone who worked on Inform 7–designers, extension-creators, helpers of all stripes.

As an aside: It’s been awhile since I played my first text adventure–and I had a weird realization that it WASN’T an Infocom work; rather, it was Scott Adams’ Pirate Adventure on my Texas Instruments TI994/A (combo cartridge and cassette!). Never really got that far.

I’m still having a devil of a time with the commenting features of this blog. Sorry about that. After the Great Purge (see below), I’m trying to turn commenting and it’s just…not…working. I guess this is a sign that the blog needs an overhaul from Wordpress 1.5, huh?

Wanted to pop in on this chilly February morning (and when is it not, up here? Right.) and give a shout out to my new agent, Colleen Lindsay, and agency, FinePrint Literary Management. I couldn’t be more thrilled! I’m really looking forward to the partnership. Publishing, and its related endeavors, can be strange ones in terms of speed. Sometimes its glacial, and sometimes you feel like you’ve entered into some kind of particle accelerator. In that way, I do think it mimics the process of writing itself–but for both, if you are persistent and patient (not always an easy combination!), inspired choices will seem to come out of nowhere.

Behold, the 1st Ballardian Festival of Home Movies. There are prizes and everything.

To those readers in the Twin Cities, the Animal Humane Society is holding a giant book sale in both their Golden Valley and Woodbury locations. Go forth!

Here’s what’s cookin’ in the latest Ministry of Education-approved Russian history textbooks:

Stalin was an “effective manager,” taking Russia from the plow to the atomic bomb in just a few years. His repressions were necessary to mobilize for war and industrialize Russia so quickly. In general, the ratings of past leaders goes like this: Khrushchev is bad because he weakened the government; Brezhnev is good because he restored it; Gorbachev and Yeltsin are both bad because they let the Soviet Union fall apart; Putin has been Russia’s best leader because he restored strong “vertical” power (which was established by Stalin).

3800 comment spam down to 0. I’m sure this is fascinating. I don’t think it’s a permanent solution, so I’ll figure out…something.

In other news, my really long review of the anthology The New Space Opera is up online at Rain Taxi. It’s…well, read the review.

Feel free to comment!!

Well, I think my frustration about the comment spam got the better of me (3700 comments in the queue now!) So I do think I want to blog again, at some point, but in a different venue. I would love to pull all of the poetics and philosophy and literary-advice-type posts into one wiki. But wait, wouldn’t that be a lot of work and defeat the purpose of a hiatus???

Okay, back to the regeneration tank.

The spam dam broke and the hordes set up residency (1400+ in comment spam). Can’t get into the comments–destroys my browser–so in the slim chance you were posting a comment, sorry I probably won’t get to it.

Anyway, that’s the spark but the fuel was there for awhile–I’m shutting the blog down. Trying to prune back on various Internet presences, and the tapiring of posting was probably a sign, too. I also need to put my money where my mouth is, dig in deep to my own writing. This is a presque isle from “me”, but it’s not the mainland. It’s not even an isthmus. So I’ll probably leave the posts up here since I’m paid up for awhile, but after that I’ll shut it down. No worries. It was a good run.

Dogpatch was a theme park based on the Lil’ Abner comics that existed from 1968-1993. It’s been defunct since that time and its abandoned grounds have become overgrown, crumbling. Here are some amazing pics of Dogpatch.

What is oddly affecting about this is how cultural forces that seem like juggernauts can become relics in a matter of a decade or two. Lil Abner ruled the world in the 40s or 50s, or at least the comics pages (which meant a lot more then than now). If you think about it, it’s really incredible that a fictional character engendered a high school dance that’s widely held even today. Yet how many high school students would know where Sadie Hawkins came from? .001%? I had no idea until recently. My only exposure to the Abnerian mythos growing up was from Fred and Barney Meet the Schmoo. And that was 30 years ago. Couple this with the fact that said Abnerian mythos is…deeply disturbing–such a panoply of caricatures carved like tiny windows into Al Capp’s black heart.

To have that Dogpatch overgrown is probably the most fitting coda possible–the misconstrued, delusional landscape softened by vines and nests. And no one really knows who Al Capp is anymore.

I wanted to get some notes on the design of Deadline Enchanter, since it seemed a couple of reviewers were interested in the genesis and thought behind the game. (I don’t even know if it can be called a game. But more about that later.) So as always, these opinions are solely my own, and are subject to alteration, etc. etc. And it’s pretty long. (Later note: Really long!)

Probably none of this is going to make sense if you haven’t played DE. So go for it! Needless to say, spoilers, but I doubt they’ll make sense anyway if you haven’t played the game. Hell, it still might not make sense even if you have played the game.

History
The first drafts of Deadline Enchanter probably came about in 2002, not terribly long after Isolato Incident was released into the wild. It was a very, very different proposition at that early stage though. For one, I was writing the game in ALAN–and I have to say that as much as I loved ALAN as an introduction and primer to writing IF, the time it would take me to figure out how to do certain things in ALAN could have been better spent working on the game itself. And any experience of writing IF is going to be dampened when the authoring system doesn’t have an UNDO feature (to be fair, ALAN 3 does). It was called Green Nights, by Anonymous, or something like that. There was The City (called St. Saul), and there were the Folk, and the princess in the Tower, and the Faux, and the Sanka/Taster’s Choice magic.

And yet the feel of that early draft was totally different than what I ended up with, and this unsatisfaction with the world and what I wanted to DO with the world helped contribute to why it took me freaking forever to finish the game. For one, my first big goal was to create a rather larger, explorable city–where the story with the Folk would intertwine with the Faux, and there would be interactions with the environment that could loosely be described as “puzzles”. This first draft actually did have some stuff that I rather liked, content-wise, that never made it to DE. For one, a few touchpoints with Gawain and the Green Knight, with (nearly?) all of those traces excised by the time of the final draft. And a lot more jazz; there was a Charlie Parker feast day in the city…

And also, the germination of the steganography of the game did emerge in this early stage, although I never actually got the chance to CODE it. See, near the end of the game, it would finally dawn upon the player (meaning you, not the meta-situated game-playing that resided within the story) that the whole point of the game would be to work out the escape route for the Princess. This revelation would have been the final twist of the game–but before that point, one woudl have played the game thinking that it was, actually, a (reasonably) grounded work of interactive fiction, with (relatively) clear demarcations of, and between, player and character. Very early on, the character would be given a charge/mission by a female knight of the Faux, with certain goals to accomplish, and a series of mimetic spaces in which to wander and find clues as to how to solve those goals, meeting denziens of the City, finding one’s way into the Tower, etc. At some point (though I didn’t get nearly this far into the programming), more of the steganography would have come into the game, but it wouldn’t have overwhelmed it.

That, at least, was the plan. But I was still too fuzzy about what, in fact, I wanted the game to do. In interactive fiction, even when one gives the player the illusion of free choice, I think that oftentimes, relentless reductionism is the way to go–at least in terms of what you want to accomplish in the game. Green Nights was too much of a tweener. I had the feeling that it was kind of the worst of both worlds–too hesitant in being, to put it crudely, a total mindfuck; too sketchy in terms of providing a full mimetic experience. For one, I’m just not good at writing puzzles. Any puzzles, including poorly implemented puzzles. And I did, actually, want to pursue the idea of a game-within-a-game-world (some of the in-game help files were written at this early stages, though I did rewrite them and temper them according to later revisions). I just wasn’t feeling like I was hitting a mark with it.

Well, years passed. Inform 7 came out and the project piqued my interest again. At this stage it WAS retitled to Deadline Enchanter. (I do think some of the earlier drafts came across as a bit too in-jokey, and I really tried to exorcise a lot of the direct references to the pre- and post-Infocom community. But, I was too in love with the title to screw with it–in writing a lot of my short stories, I’ll just start with a title before having any clue as to what the story is about. Plus, scrunching the two words together were hopefully evoking the kind of ‘eldritch noir’ that I was going for.) Anyway, the port to Inform was astoundingly easy, but then once again I kept hitting roadblocks regarding “that vision thing.” There was no voice to the game, only rooms.

It was this last summer where DE started to take its final shape. I’d dusted it off again, and–I’m not sure what, exactly, precipitated this–decided to distill the game as to what interested me most about it. It sounds stupid, now, writing this (and italicizing it…sorry) but it’s often really difficult to put into practice, with any piece of art. What do you want to do with it? What are your parameters, spoken or unspoken? I’d realized that what interested me most about DE was, in fact, the Princess’s predicament, and how the player-character would discover the path to set her free. But what if I started with that path? What if the discovery didn’t involve the what (i.e., the very fact that the game is an act of steganography becoming the big revelation) but the why (i.e., what’s going on in this world? Who is this person that desperately needs your help?).

And so, the Princess would set the game on rails, and the player would know exactly where to go and what to do. Cutting out exploration in the game almost entirely was a liberating experience! I stopped trying to cram the game into what I thought it ought to have done and just let it be what it needed to be. Which, obviously, is nothing new–there are games far, far more brilliant and moving than mine that are completely (or almost so) linear. But it felt good to at last discover the shape that it would take.

From there, I could concentrate on the voice–and it was really fun to write in the narrator’s voice. That, more than anything, drove the story forward. I could concentrate on letting her have a relationship with the player in her world (and by extension, the actual player)–cajoling, entreating, vain, angry, fragile. It gave me an avenue into characterization that I actually never have had before, with more static forms of fiction.

Even though I don’t know if DE can be called a work of interactive fiction per se, working in Inform and having tbe player drive the story forward gave an uncertain, kind of unpredictable texture to the narrative that, for me, got a lot of its juice from altering narrative pacing (more on this below). Splicing in cut scenes, having a place where the player thinks he or she is interacting with the story but it’s actually JUST a cut scene, the one yes-or-no question, etc. All of these, obviously, are old, effective tricks. But in writing DE, I was having a character implement these tricks. I was letting her create the narrative–using, in a way, the forms of “conversation” of her ancestors to dictate what the player could experience (BADGER, SEDUCE, MOLLIFY, etc.).

All of the sudden I had a very tight deadline, but at least the writing was flowing through that voice. When I got about halfway through, close to the point with the doll and the doll’s massacre of the guards, I began to wonder if our fearless/fearful narrator was a bit more complicated than I had initially conceived. Part of this had to do with the ending–what would happen? Would the player-character somehow manage to open the cell and let her roam free in the game world? It seemed a bit anticlimatic. But I also began wondering just what kind of character she was. She didn’t seem the type who would just ride off into the sunset, her lover being captured. Did she even want to be free? And what did “freedom” mean to her? A twist began to develop, in which she offered the player the choice to sacrifice her to save her lover, or…nothing–to stay at home, turn off the Implementation and let them both perish.

Projective Fiction
So, there are a “few” notes on the narrative. Moving into larger issues of classification, I don’t know if the work is “interactive fiction” per se as much as “projective fiction.” I keep bouncing in and out of Olson’s “”Projective Verse” essay; the “composition by field.” That is (and this might very well be mangling Olson’s intentions), a way of creating a “breath” or beat for a narrative work. It’s not work that really tries for mimesis or simulacra (except, of course, in the sense that any static work of fiction creates a relationship with a reader through sentences and paragraphs), but rather uses the parser to shape the temporal information presented to the reader. It’s a different type of linearity than that on the printed page, yet is a way to determine that, as Olson said, “ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION.”

Comics/graphic novels also manipulate the reader’s perception of the narrative–through visuals, of course, but also through tweaking time: the size of the panels, the level of information presented in a panel (which can be broken down as a unit of composition, much like a line of poem; for a work of IF/projective fiction, what is that unit? The space between one given command to the next. Even if that command is “Press Space to Continue.” That is the “panel” that each writer/coder has to work with. I doubt very much, btw, that this was what Olson had in mind.)

Notes for thought and the faintest possible thumbnails, for future work.

A Last Note on Conversation
One other aspect of game design that didn’t actually occur to me until the game was long finished–that DE could be considered one giant conversation system. A back and forth telling superimposed on a landscape. Not that this was intended by any means, but it makes sense.

What’s to be Done
Quite a bit; a whole hell of a lot. I need to fix some of the sequencing in the prison cell (providing a walkthrough in the form of a book there, as well). I’ve been working on converting all the default parser responses into Folk speak (the narrator’s or the vestigal Implementation that has been superimposed upon by our narrator; actually, that is turning out to be a huge problem–to figure out how to clue to the player which of the two is “speaking”). The fight scene with the doll really needs to be fixed. Along with the normal draft issues, that will all take some time, but hopefully the most recent build of DE, when it does come out, will make it a more enjoyable experience.

From here: “Among at least a subset of (the younger) musicians and fans, this class separation has made indie more openly snobbish and narrow-minded. In the darkest interpretation, one could look at the split between a harmony-and-lyrics-oriented indie field and a rhythm-and-dance-specialized rap/R&B scene as mirroring the developing global split between an internationalist, educated comprador class (in which musically, one week Berlin is hot, the next Sweden, the next Canada, the next Brazil) and a far less mobile, menial-labor market. The elite status and media sway that indie rock enjoys, disproportionate to its popularity, is one reason the cultural politics of indie musicians and fans require discussion in the first place…”

Listening to: Hall and Oates (Private Eyes) and the new Wu Tang now…they’re both…not what I expected, but in a good way.

John explains what is going on here.. It’s probably better to read this first, and then pass on to here. Thanks to John and the other writers in the anthology, who I know put a lot of hard work into the anthology.

Logorrhea was a great, great anthology which I was thrilled to be a part of. If you haven’t checked it out yet, do so!!

I’d actually posted quite a bit about the genesis of my story, “Plight of the Sycophant,” at the Lit Blog Co-Op here. I actually read it at Normadale Community College last week and the kids actually liked it. I drew a map on the whiteboard as I was reading it, and I thought it would help, but it didn’t. They still liked it tho.

There’s also a podcast of the story, including the section below.

Jeff VanderMeer wrote a story that incorporated every word that was included in the anthology, called “Appoggiatura”. And here’s his section of the story that included my word, sycophant. I really like this story.

SYCOPHANT

The young man who sat down beside the writer Baryut Aquelus in a Tashkent coffeehouse wore a black blazer over a green t-shirt and blue jeans. He had sallow skin, an open, round face, and thick eyebrows. His mouth was fleshy, as if he’d suffered a split lip.

The writer thought he recognized the type. The first words confirmed it.

“Are you—? Are you really—?” The rasp of a mouthbreather, along with the stain and smell of betel nut.

“Yes.”

He no longer bothered to smile or straighten his jacket when people came up to him. It had been a few years since he’d removed himself from the great, the smoldering, eye of fame, but he remembered its heat.

“I’ve read all of your work, sir. Even Myths of the Green Tablet. A very brave book.”

“You speak like a native Smaragdinean,” the writer said.

The man looked away, actually blushed. The writer found this charming.

“Thank you. I came there as a child. I know English. And French, too. A little. I read you in French, at first.”

How long ago? He’d been out of print in France for at least half a decade.

“That’s very good, um…?”

“Oh—Farid. You can call me Farid Sabouri.”

“Nice to meet you, Farid.”

The notebook in front of him now seemed inert, useless. The thoughts welling up behind the pen receded into some middle distance, waiting for him to call them forth again.

“Tell me, if I’m not bothering you,” Farid said, “how you came to write Myths of the Green Tablet.”

“You mean you don’t know?” He’d meant it as self-deprecating but it came out vainglorious. “I guess I’ve told it so many times I expect anyone who wanted to know would know.”

It had gotten him in trouble. Vague death threats from a bunch of doddering priests. A shorter stint at the university in Smaragdine than he would have liked. The Green Tablet not the gospel, not even vaguely true? He hadn’t realized the effect it would have when he was writing it—he just wrote it.

“I know, but it’s different reading it in the paper.”

“Well, if you insist.” Do I really mind that much? “I wrote it because I think that Smaragdine has suffered from its fetish for the color green. It keeps us looking at the past. I feel that, for the average Smaragdinean, the future is behind him. I mean, it’s practically fantastical. Medieval. Alchemy? Airy-fairy about earth-air-water-fire? No offense,” he added, noting the intent look on Farid’s face.

Farid smiled, revealing yellowing teeth, and said, “I am fascinated by the bravery in the act. To become a…a lightning rod for many difficulties.”

“Yes, well…”

Above them the fans swirled slowly and out on the street a steady procession of outdated vehicles used the worn street. The waiter came with two coffees.

“My gift for our meeting,” Farid said. “Please, enjoy it.”

“Thank you,” the writer said. And he was, actually, surprised. Usually the people who came up to him wanted something but offered nothing, no matter how trivial, in return.

“So what brings you to Tashkent?” the writer asked.

Farid did not look away this time. “I came to see you. I studied your work at university. I’ve studied your life, too.”

Oh no, the writer thought, here it comes. Sometimes he felt his personal life had become the size of a postage stamp.

“And did I measure up?”

“Oh, you are very brave,” Farid said. “Although I don’t know if you understand that.”

“It’s kind of you to say,” the writer said, although Farid’s syntax seemed odd.

Farid almost said something, stopped, bit his lip, leaned forward. “No, it’s the truth. It makes me weep a little, thinking about it. If you don’t mind me saying it. You’ve used your talent for things that don’t always make sense to me.”

The writer tried to shrug it off with a chuckle.

Is this where the conversation turns obsessional?

“And here I took you for a bit of a sycophant, Farid. A bit of a hanger-on, as the Brits here like to say.”

“Not in the least—you believe too little but know too much,” Farid said, and pulled out a gun and shot the writer in the stomach.

Baryut had the odd sensation of Farid walking over him and past while he lay there staring up at the ceiling fan and people were running around screaming. There was no pain. Nothing so fast could really be painful, could it?

Possessed of a sudden and terrible clarity, Baryut thought: What can I write in the next few minutes?

*end of story*

I hope that the formatting turned out okay.