Stephen King once said that he considers you talented at writing if you’re able to pay the electric bill with money somebody gave you for something you wrote. This is great, but I have an ever-increasing number of arcade games down here, meaning my electric bill creeps higher and higher each month.  I therefore become more and more untalented at writing in the eyes of Stephen King every time I add another one. This sucks, though I’m one impulse Pengo away from getting a three-picture deal as I transmorph into Dan Brown.

I can’t get any money from the writing of interactive fiction, but luckily that doesn’t stop me from pumping money into it. I just ordered 100 promotional CDs, to be handed out for free at the Interactive Fiction Suite at the end of the month at PAX East. If you don’t know what any of that means, here’s a link. I tried to add some new games to the 2005 version on the archive. I don’t want to imply that the only people likely to read this blog post are my fellow developers of Interactive Fiction, but if I didn’t add your game, it’s only because I got this project at the last minute and was only able to get a hold of people I already knew. Games 40-75 on the thing are just recompiled Annoyotrons. My favorite’s “grape,” and I think yours will be, too. In putting the disc together, I became extremely frustrated with both of the .ISO managers I used, but I complained into Google Buzz to ensure that nobody would ever, ever see it. Oh, except for Chinese nationalists (你好, amigos!).

I think we’ve got Mrs. Winchester’s other nightmare nicely defined here, but at any rate, that should prevent anyone just walking off with the entire spindle of discs because they were attracted to pure aesthetics of it.  I did clean up the ripped wallpaper under the Lacuna Bee, but – “Template Is On,” more like GAME IS ON, BABY one sec, I have to get the door, a guy is dropping off an environmental Boon-ga Boon-ga cabinet tonight.

Okay, I’m back. My kitchen is actually more of a patient-zero mess than the one on the disc there, so I have to go. See you at PAX East! Oh – right: the gentleman that dropped the game off was average in height, with a slender build and narrow shoulders.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Alex Gray as Jarrett Duffy

I fixed a Linux bug in Necrotic Drift. You can get the latest version here. There’s no gameplay changes. Well, unless you were trying to play it in Linux (you might get farther now). Get v1.03 here: http://www.joltcountry.com/downloads/ndrift.zip

If you need the Hugo interpreter, I’d try here: http://www.generalcoffee.com/hugo/gethugo.html#linux

Or maybe Mike Snyder’s site here: http://www.sidneymerk.com/hugofree.shtml

Popularity: 14% [?]

The hamper managed to tip over on all three cats, throwing them all into some kind of Parker Brother Presents Mouse Trap II: Kitty Jail, so I’m taking the ten minutes I have before the whining becomes unbearable at an evolutionary level to write up what I would have said on Twitter if I had more goddamn space.

But first a word – I like the 140 character limit. On Caltrops, we give people 80 characters in the message title of posts, and we frequently type our whole post in there. So Twitter gives me more space than what I am used to. Additionally, there is an appeal in brevity. If you’re at all like me and ruined your life at age 35, well, welcome to a world where texting a revolving stream of women is a valid method of communication you’d better be good at. I’m all for making a 700KB text game, but Sally ain’t reading that crap before deciding to call the third date off anyway.

Here’s a Twitter comment that could use some expanding in this, the Expanded Twitter Universe:

“So me, Galatea and Lex were the only people who didn’t go to #pax, and Lex already ‘did’ swine flu.(I’d risk it for early Scribblenauts,btw)”

Let’s break it down.

First thing you need to know is that PAX stands for the Penny Arcade … Expo, I think. Exhibit? I don’t really know, but it’s a convention and like the Montreal Expos, ultimately fated for disaster and ruin, as swine flu has been confirmed to be making the ways around.

I’m not going to go for the easy targets here – there’s a lot of ripe gamers. Senor Barborito called this unclean-ly valley shit years ago here, when it was called Lanwerx. Easy jokes that people are making, easily. Let’s go beyond that. My heart goes out to anyone who contracted hip SARS at PAX.

Emily Short wrote a tweet when PAX was actually going on that she felt like the only person who wasn’t attending. She also wrote a game with a richly-detailed non-player character named Galatea. (In retrospect, it seems like I am calling her Galatea. Not the case! I just thought it would be funnier to reference her creation instead. I can also see Galatea the statue being able to attend PAX before I get a chance to, actually/sadly.)

Lex is on Twitter as “Lettuphant.” He thought he was coming down with Swine Flu over Twitter a few weeks ago. Unfortunatley, I was really pressed for space, so I had to call him by his name, instead of his Twitter handle. (In fact, I had to go with his BBS name “Lex” instead of “Alex” because I was pressed for space.)

The last bit is about Scribblenauts. I can’t wait for Scribblenauts! Get this – somebody makes a game where you write in what objects you want your character to get… and they GET THEM. How great is that? You need a ladder in a game, you type in “ladder,” you get a ladder. You need a machine gun, you type in machine gun and – presto! I would literally give a finger for their database. I mean, not even kidding, that database is worth a small finger on my left, non-dominant hand. To me. (Erm, if I could use it to build a text game off it.) In fact, I’ll go ahead and say that if it contains what I think it does (properties of tens of thousands of everyday objects and animals) that it is the single most-valuable resource in video games today.

And apparently the game was at PAX, well before its release date.

I’d risk a little bit of flu to play it. It’s not like you’re guaranteed to get it. (Swine flu or a few minutes with Scribblenauts, actually.)  However, the thing is, I’ve been teasing my imagination with how it’s coming out next week and everything. I typed “Scribblenauts” into Google News a few hours ago at work and saw something about how it might be pushed to October. Oh no! It might just be the European release, which – honestly, the Europeans don’t deserve this indignity. I don’t have all the facts yet, but I can’t wait till this game comes out, even though there’s little chance it’s going to be as good as it is in my head, based on what I know of the concept.

At any rate, where I really wanted to go with this is how it would be great to make a language-independent, open source DB that was filled with all sorts of characteristics about everyday objects and creatures, for IF. I’ve started to finally implement things like “desk_class” and “table_class” in my own works-in-progress, but man, it’d be great to have access to more. Text game languages give us dozens of verbs “built in,” why not a complete living room set or office setup?

Someday!

Popularity: 31% [?]

I’m replaying Circuit’s Edge, which was a graphical text adventure developed by Westwood, under the post-merger Infocom label. I once said it was the 59th best game ever made. While that list, um… is in desperate need of an update, I still feel it’s excellent, playing it in 2009 instead of 1989.

It’s great, yeah, but not perfect. In many cases, default dialogue is used for all characters on some plot-insensitive subjects.  The manual’s map is just wrong about the locations of certain shoppes. You can only save in Marid’s (the protagonist) apartment. There’s a police computer that will let you look up anyone if you know their full name – while it’s never mentioned in the game, I’ve read the three Budayeen books enough times to have the name of the Marid’s ex-girlfriend memorized (Yasmin Nablusi) and she’s not in there. I’m not saying it’s bad, but it could have been perfect.

(I’m going to hope the fact that the first thing I did when I gained access to a futuristic criminal database was look up an ex-girlfriend is just sort of glossed over here.)

But the game rocked my world during those years where your world can get rocked by things, and I’m thankful to know that it still holds up.

Circuit’s Edge was developed in part with the author of the source material, George Alec Effinger. George wrote three novels that featured Marid Audran, commonly referred to as the Budayeen series, for its setting. I’ve tried, over the years, to acquire everything George ever wrote. He’s my favorite author, and I suppose he always will be. But I have this “thing” about finishing games and reading everything a deceased author wrote, which is just – if you finish everything… then it’s over. There’s no new stuff. So long as I didn’t do the last couple of missions in Circuit’s Edge, the game would never really be over for me. But as I start to accept the fact that I’m going to have less and less time for gaming over the next thirty years,  well… okay, I just wanted to finish it.

Same with George’s books. I purchased a recent anthology titled A Thousand Deaths. It’s not a Budayeen-based work. Rather, it contains the stories involving one of George’s other protagonists, Sandor Courane.  Sandor – and this is not a spoiler, it’s on the dust jacket – passes away in a number of the stories George wrote that featured him. I’m just getting around to reading all the short stories within, but the feature is definitely the complete 1981 work The Wolves of Memory.  I don’t want to spoil anything, but George passed away at 56 after a long battle with stomach problems and while he wrote it well before having any idea of what his fate was, you can retro-fit some things as metaphor.

As an professional author, George didn’t have proper health insurance. He was great at what he did, but he wasn’t making the kind of money where money wasn’t a problem. After years of treatment at Charity Hospital in New Orleans, which he did not enjoy, he finally had an operation in “the early 1990s” at Tulane University Hospital. He wasn’t able to pay the bill, and the hospital went after the most valuable thing he had, his intellectual property.

I mean – okay, the hospital obviously needed to be paid, I have no problem with that. George shut it down, when it came to the Budayeen, after that. He got two chapters into the fourth Marid Audran novel (and honestly, having read them, they are the best work he ever did, his characters absolutely crackle with life, and whatever reservations I had with much of the third novel, The Exile Kiss, are blown away. The man was at the top of his game.) and that’s all he ever did. He wasn’t going to work on it if every penny was going to directly go to the hospital.

You can criticize his decision. You can criticize the heartlessness of the hospital. My hobby of making text games is, at some level, and attempt to make the kinds of things that people that loved George’s writing might enjoy, without mimicking him. It’s that way for me because I feel there was at least one amazing novel we never got because of circumstance. So that’s why I’m in favor of some kind of universal health care in this country. I couldn’t speak to the details, or how anyone’s going to pay for anything, but it seems silly that lives are saved and financially destroyed at the same time.

I believe that Fyodor Dostoyevsky said “The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering the prisons.” (For real, it’s what I believe, I had the quote totally wrong in my mind and did some Googling, and came up with that. It’s totally not fact-checked.) And that’s fine, but I think you can say something similar regarding how it treats its artists.

Popularity: 30% [?]

I wrote a scene in Fallacy of Dawn where the player is expected to give horrible games to a clerk that is a bit of a gaming elitist. The clerk can’t BELIEVE you came to the counter with a few gems from the bargain bin, and… okay, it isn’t the best puzzle in the world. 

My brother gave me Battlecruiser: 3000 AD for Christmas one year. This is because he is the greatest brother, ever. (He also played Delarion Yar, the main character in Fallacy of Dawn, and doing that even though it greatly annoyed him also makes him the greatest brother, ever.) The idea of a bunch of people going to work and finshing up with something that is truly miserable does sort of fascinate me in a perverse way.

There really is a sort of “classic” list of the worst video games in the world. I’ll try to list them below. They are the ones that always seem to show up on lists like “The 20 Worst Games of All-Time” and such. Annnnnd, because I am an enormous dork, I can’t help but read every “Worst Games Ever” article ever made. It’s a curse.

The list: Pac-Man, E.T. and Custer’s Revenge for the Atari 2600. Superman for the Nintendo 64. Battlecruiser 3000AD, Extreme Paintbrawl, Daikatana* and Outpost for the PC. Rise of the Robots for the Amiga. Finishing up is Sewer Shark and Night Trap for the Sega CD.

I mean, that is a fairly standard list. Season to taste, certainly. You can’t go wrong with those. A list generated by a group of game journalists would probably include those games (although PC Gamer was good enough to give the completely unfinished Outpost a 93%). Sprinkle with something acerbic regarding the Virtual Boy and you have yourself an article. Gamasutra could turn the above list into 33 pages and then remove the “print” option so they can level up their Adsense account. 

… And personally, hey, I never questioned those choices. I certainly did not feel that E.T. and Pac-Man were terrible games when I was growing up, but that’s not been a fight I felt passionate about. They didn’t seem any worse than many other 2600 games, and I did not spend a terrible amount of time in arcades when I was like seven, so the “real” Pac-Man was not burned into my memory. And in all honesty, they are usually included because what they represent, which was the temporary death of the domestic gaming industry.

(I began a thread on my BBS about the worst games ever, and I was trying to limit it to games I actually played and personally detested. Pac-Man, E.T. and so forth weren’t going to be on it. The thread sort of stalled because I promised myself that I’d go back and re-play every single game… and honestly, it’s just been a little difficult finding the time to play in irony the last couple of months.) 

But here is the reason I am writing all of this. Tonight, I was sent a Youtube video that shows the final scene to Night Trap. I am actually angry about this – I am smiling in anger.

 

 

At the very end of the video, you imprison some… well, I don’t know what they are specifically, a vampire or shadowbitch or something. (The last girl on the screen before Dana Plato is one such monster.) And then Dana tells you what a great guy you are for solving the game and saving all the girls you could. Right on. 

She turns to leave, walks down the hall and says, “Nah, you wouldn’t.”

At this point in the video, it appears that the same trap was triggered for her, the protagonist, as was triggered for the vampire a moment earlier. And I just assumed that the ending of the game was like that. But my friend said, no, you can actually press the “trap” button there. You have to press it for that to happen.

That’s when everything I thought I knew turned false.

What? What the — what? That is unbelievable! That totally gives the player a chance to – in NIGHT TRAP OF ALL GAMES, it — all right, I am going to try to compose myself here. It’s amazing and unexpected.

OK, first off, letting a trap be invoked right there messes with the player/player character relationship. That is supposed to be one of the big “things” you can experiment with in text adventures, and here is a wholly miserable and unloved FMV game pulling it off. And it’s our thing! Not Full Motion Video’s thing! It’s IF’s thing! Secondly, it allows for a meaningful moral choice right at the end of the game. Yes, it is a binary decision, and those can be as lame as they were in BioShock, but in Night Trap, it’s fast, it’s quick – you’re deciding what to do in a split second and the real-time nature of Night Trap actually works in its favor, to its credit. (Believe me, when I woke up today, I didn’t think I’d end it complimenting frigging Night Trap.) 

Lastly,  even in a game with universally terrible acting like Night Trap, Dana Plato is good enough to act distressed for three seconds. Admittedly, the laughable CGI effect that follows ruins the moment, but for a few seconds there is an actual bit of negative feedback as the PC screams and pleads for her own life.

And this is supposed to be one of the worst games of all-time.

I played Night Trap once, briefly, when it was new, and yeah – it sucks. Totally and completely. The writing is terrible, the acting embarrassing, and the gameplay kind of stale. I’m not trying to argue otherwise. But I can safely say that this “twist,” or this last-second player decision saves it from the rep it got over the years. I used to believe that there was no point in continuing to play a horrible game after a couple hours, but for the first time, Night Trap has me thinking, maybe, otherwise. It’s a total revelation. And in my opinion, it should be more famous for that.

 

*I purchased Daikatana last year, from a vendor on eBay. I had to know if it was as terrible as everyone says. It’s not great, but again, it’s nowhere near one of the “worst games of all-time.” And getting mad at John Romero is like getting mad at Manny Ramirez for something. You know what you’re in for, and Ion Storm the company was probably as bad an idea as Manny being allowed to manage the Washington Nationalsin 2014. But no, Daikatana wasn’t that unpleasant. If I get on Youtube tonight and find that the ending of Daikatana has you making a choice about the fate of Hiro Miyamoto, I am going to hang myself.

Popularity: 73% [?]

Course ya do. 

Aardvark, from the JC BBS, made the following and I think it speaks for itself. I’ll be submitting the paperwork for its eventual grammy nomination shortly.

(If you have absolutely no idea what this is in reference to, please go here.)

Popularity: 81% [?]

Thomas M. Disch, author of the 1986 text adventure Amnesia (published by Electronic Arts) passed away on July 4th. He took his own life.

Every May my friend Greg returns to Colorado, and we go out and have a drink or play some Xenophobe or something, and funnily enough, this game came up in our conversation. Amnesia, the game, was the first thing I had ever tried to buy over the Internet.

Back around 1998 someone offered it for sale on one of the newsgroups. I wrote them saying that I would buy it. Everything was agreed upon and I just forgot to, ah, actually send the check. I was “that guy.” I ended up being a more responsible Internet buyer, and got the copy depicted above. You know the big box of computer manuals that every PC gamer has? Yeah, the manual to Amnesia was on top and one of our cats decided to sleep in said box and then scratch it all to make itself cozy. Whoops.

I know that in 2008, having a game that says AMNESIA on the cover is like making a game called MAZES or MY COLLEGE DORMROOM. I don’t quite think it was this terrible cliche, but Amnesia gave you plenty to do – my main gripe with interactive fiction that features amnesia on the part of the protagonist is that it requires an enormous leap of faith to keep playing. Amnesia – Disch’s game – wasn’t like that.

But why it will always be special to me is because it was the first game that I played that seemed “infinite.” Elite did that for people, and Starflight and a few sandbox-style games as well. Amnesia said it had much of Manhattan available. You were wandering around New York City (!!!) in a video game! Sure, it was all text, but we didn’t care!

Of course, later you learn that while much of the city may have been represented, it was not in a meaningful way. You learn about the limitations of computers and further games can’t trick you like that. But for me, Disch’s Amnesia was the one that gave me pause as a kid and wonder about what kind of universes could be created in a floppy disk.

Amnesia had one direct influence on my own IF work. My original plan for Pantomime was to have the entire Phobos colony represented. I wanted the player to be able to go to any door and maybe break it down and explore inside and get sub quests from there. With only a few people left behind on the colony, it would be doable. I ultimately had to scrap it. I left a little bit into it, however – all the hallways and doors are there for the apartment that Raif, the protagonist, lives in. Someday I’ll try to revisit that. Given enough time, I think the dreams that Thomas Disch had for his text game could be a reality.

One last thing. Jason Scott, who is working on a text game documentary, wrote Mr. Disch a while ago to see if he would be available for an interview. The exchange is here. Disch says, “[M]y memory of the particulars of Amnesia are foggy after all this time–and the genre I worked in never took off: interactive fiction, text only. “

And this is sad, to me. I have made so many friends through interactive fiction and had so many good times. I have created things that I am truly proud of, and received the kind of useful criticism that has helped me grow and mature as a writer. But yeah, mostly the friends thing. It’s very sad to me that he didn’t remotely get the same pleasures out of it. I can accept IF being irrelevant to the wide majority of the population, I mean, you have to come to grips with that or you are not living in reality, but to see a very talented individual create the fiction of what was a very playable game and end up with that take on it… that’s depressing.

I hope he found the peace he was looking for. If I can figure out how to play Amnesia in DOSbox or something, I’ll pass this info on. As a PC Booter game, I think those are somewhat difficult to emulate.

UPDATE: I have since learned that Disch was worried about losing his rent-controlled apartment in NYC, as it was in his partner’s name. Speculation is that he ended his own life at least in part due to these circumstances. Whoever the landlord is, whose greed in squeezing some extra money out of a place lived in by a 68-year old man came to light:  way to fucking live up to the cliche, slugger.

Popularity: 60% [?]

When I made A Crimson Spring, I was learning a new IF programming language, drawing comic book-style art after a lengthy layoff, getting music integrated, and displaying graphics. I didn’t have nearly enough time to get all that stuff presented professionally before the 2000 Competition deadline.

So when it was time to make the next game, I decided to use actors and eliminate music. I had learned how to use Photoshop a few years earlier when I was working as a printer driver tester at Xerox. I was just basically hitting a print icon over and over, so there was, ah, a lot of downtime.  I knew I wanted the graphics to reflect the distorted reality of the protagonist (Delarion Yar, in the game Fallacy of Dawn) and the effects that Photoshop came with were pretty good for this goal.

I did not have a digital camera in 2000. I bought a scanner for A Crimson Spring and that was the extent of how futuristic I felt like getting, so for FoD, I just used a regular 35mm camera for photos. It was about December of 2000 when I started taking pictures, and it was snowing, so that is why Fallacy of Dawn is set in the winter. (The game’s design doc says that it takes place on December 26th, 2014, a Friday. I think I picked that day and then forgot about it while developing, since nobody asks anyone else what they got for Christmas. Presumably because nobody cares enough to give presents? An unintended side effect of a dystopian future!)

But I also needed someone to play Delarion, someone who I saw all the time and who would put up with the enormous hassle of being told things like, “wear this shirt and sometimes hold a fake, orange gun up to the camera.” This person became my brother Michael, since I was living with him at the time in Fort Collins.

It actually annoyed the hell out of him, too. But he was also very, very patient with me, and very forgiving. The shirt I used was a Cafe Press-printed, long-sleeved shirt with an “Old Man Murray” logo on the front. The cut of the thing is just crazy, quite billowy, and it really does seem more like pajamas than anything else. To this day I am not 100% certain that my brother knows what the game was about. But with someone you are very familiar with, it’s pretty easy to set up scenes and go on location and get the shots you need.

I also enlisted the help of several friends that dropped by our townhouse. It has been my experience that people are glad to help you the first time you ask them to act in a video game, the trick is to just not make it take multiple sessions, where you are dragging them back and making the process tedious. This is somewhat problematic due to how I put together the plot for my games – I essentially have an outline of the various scenes, and the bare minimum of what needs to be said or communicated to advance the plot. I leave myself a lot of room for how the scene develops, because I can’t stand looking at a batch of strict requirements and then having to creatively write to it. So with IF, I just jot stuff down like, “at the end, the player must have a piece of paper that says THIS IS A CLUE.” I try to develop a couple ways (at least for my current work-in-progress) for the player to arrive there. Of course, I find that 90% choose the same way when there are options, but what the heck.

Anyway, this does sort of leave game photos and the state of the plot at odds. It’s difficult to tell a potential actor that you want them to investigate a dead body in a very specific way, weep openly at someone very close to the PC dying, and to then eat some Ice Cream Cones cereal… when the programmer only has “FRIEND DIES, FUNERAL IS ONE WHERE YOU EAT AT” written down in his design document. Oh, and the friend hasn’t been cast yet.

So I try to take lots of shots of locations – those are easy to get, easy to manipulate, and you do not have to worry about someone looking fat when it’s just a brick wall with a mud splatter on it.  There is also a fine tradition of first person shooters giving you a first-person perspective of the action.

I have many more friends that live outside of Colorado than within, so this also has me writing text files for potential actors and actresses, with the best approximation of scene descriptions at a given time. The longer I wait to send those out, the more in-step the pictures are with the game, but when I close out a given room, I like to have the pictures completely taken care of. I find that my memory gets poor the longer I am away from a room or scene, so I am somewhat reluctant to go back and integrate a late batch of pics. It’s a juggling act, I guess.

I did finally get a digital camera. Well, Dayna has one, so I just borrow hers. It’s nice, it shoots up to something like 2,000 pixels by 2,000 pixels. While I eventually bring the graphics down to a 600 pixel-wide rectangle, I need a lot of source material to get the effects right. But while in Vegas last year I had a chance to take some photos with Jason Scott’s freaking uber-camera, while shooting Jon Blask for the next game. That was an absolutely amazing piece of modern technology. The difference between our Canon A60 and that was much more dramatic than I had thought. Which is a bit unfortunate, as I really, truly do not need to add photography to the list of hobbies and interests I have going. I totally can’t EVEN afford to, and I am sure I will convince myself that it’s “just one camera, that’s just one thing!!” before I tackle the next graphical adventure, because I have unbelievably poor impulse control and a crippling case of the gimmie-gimmies.

OK, for part two I will try to link some specifics between what I scribbled down in a game’s design doc, and the actual photo taken.  

Popularity: 62% [?]

I’ve reached the point of no return when it comes to writing a text game. I’m a complete mess.

I can’t remember the last time I got a good night’s sleep in some kind of string. I’m not just saying that: I’m trying. I’ve tried. Nothing comes back to me as a solid memory that I can point to. I was regularly going to bed at two thirty until I realized that the alarm would more nicely interrupt me outside of a sweet spot if I worked for an hour later. I still wake up completely fatigued. My muscles ache and complain, my knees creak and pop, and there are deep, purple bags under my eyes at all times. I avoid mirrors and all reflective surfaces when possible. I crawl into bed and think about the game, think about what I will be writing next, think about how poor the slop is that I made the night before and how to fix it. Once or twice a day I completely lose my breath and while doing nothing.  I need more exercise, I need more rest, I need to eat more fruits and vegetables and vitamins.

I have forgotten birthdays, anniversaries, holidays and celebrations – both made-up by greeting card companies and those I helped to create through the amazing and fortunate successes in my previous life. The only people I can connect to are on-line, in chat rooms, in e-mail, on forums, since they are the ones that make the least number of demands to my time. I judge every possible experience as to whether or not it is taking away from the time I have to write. I demand that movies be better than the quality of the game I have imagined I am making in my head, and silently curse them when it’s obvious that they aren’t. I come to a slow burn putting a DVD in the player, since that requires fighting with the Xbox, trying to immediately get to the menu screen, sitting through the insipid, unskippable bullshit the studio asked for, hoping the last Netflix customer didn’t take a safety razor to the disc, causing freeze-ups. Some worthless suit deigned that their terrible movie or season of TV shows should roll animation for twenty seconds before you can start the chapter or next episode and I wish them their death for having the arrogance to waste my time.

I worry about dying with the game unfinished. I fret over the fact that a glass of gin and Wal-Mart off-brand Kool-Aid gets me almost immediately in the mood to write, and that I don’t let myself do all the time because I’ll develop it into a problem due to my poor impulse control. I feel a deep despair when I play the acoustic versions of the pop punk songs that get my brain into the mode it needs to be to write. I find myself wishing I could exist in a featureless white void of a room for the days I’ve computed I could finish the game in, if I wrote an ever-changing number of lines of code a day.

I get back test scripts and feedback and decide, a dozen times over, to just give up. To be a consumer for the rest of my life. I read what I gave another person to test and find it shit, find it terrible, predictable, moronic, unfunny, uncreative, small-minded, incompetent. The dialogue doesn’t crackle. The scenery isn’t implemented. The puzzles aren’t rewarding. They tried things I need to implement, they found holes in my narrative I hoped nobody would notice. It all needs to be addressed.

I laugh at myself over the fact that the only subject I could get in front of a room of people and teach — the only thing I have ever mastered in my entire life in almost three and a half decades — is how to code in the 4th-most popular text game development environment.

I have become a terrible friend, a terrible confidant, a miserable person with which to live, an empty shell of once happy and functional human being. Nothing I can do will change this until the game is finished and complete and released and judged. I could promise to take a week off and “recover” and get maybe two days into it before the nagging, empty, spectre of text game making pulls me in again and demands that I continue. There’s literally nothing else I want to do in my life but this. Everything else is sighworthy. What is wrong with me. There’s at least an end in sight. There is at least that. This will be the creation I will be remembered by, if I am remembered at all, and every day I have spent on it hurts.

Popularity: 57% [?]

Jimmy Maher was nice enough to play and review No Time to Squeal, a game I did with Mike Sousa a few years ago. Check out his thoughts here. There’s one part that I’d like to comment on – I would have had a take regardless of whether it was in a review of one of my games, it just would have, ah, taken longer to put together:

There's a saying in creative writing that every time you 

introduce a significant character, object, or symbol, the 

reader puts that in his metaphorical backpack. By the end 

of the story, he should have emptied his backpack out again, 

having disposed of everything in its proper place. (Or 

alternately, see Chekhov's famous comments about the gun 

over the mantelpiece in Act 1.)  

I had heard this before, but just in the same way you hear about a lot of things on the Internet - poorly sourced and with bad fonts. I never gave it a lot of thought, in much the same way you wouldn’t spend too much time on the predictions of John Titor if someone wrote them out in Comic Sans. But it is important, isn’t it? People have been having this sort of complaint about my text adventures for quite some time.

For instance, In Pantomime, who gave Raif the liquid code that modified his eyes to show the presence of mimes? In Fallacy of Dawn, who authorized the attempt at blowing up the arcade? In Necrotic Drift, how did the Xbox get into the mall, I mean, physically into the mall? (OK, I am just kidding with the last one.) I had my own theories as to those questions, but I never believed in putting everything out there for the player to see - I have always tried to give the player something to think about and interpret themselves afterwards. I think it’s safe to say that I am pretty frigging bad at this.

Some of this horribleness stems from the fact that I interact with many of the same people who play these games, and if I get asked a question on the mud, I’m not this huge prick that is going to say, “HURRR, figure it out yourself!” It just would be impolite. In Necrotic Drift, there is convoluted process to save a character at the end that normally dies, and that became known because someone on the Interactive Fiction MUD asked if it was possible, and I said, “Ahhhh, er, yes, but it’s more an Easter Egg than anything else.” When that process became well-known and searchable, it seemed stupid and broke protocols between text game authors and their players. There are authors out there - of text games and static fiction - who, when queried as to a ponderable in their work, can ask you what you think with a twinkle in their eye and curled-up grin on their lips. But when I try to do that through an e-mail, the emoticon I have to use just looks like it has palsy.

That being said, I am coming to grips with the fact that there are expectations in static fiction that apply to text games. People want to see things resolved with Chekov’s Gun. I’ve never taken a course on creative writing, and it’s fair to say that I am left pondering many big issues when it comes to finishing a novel or seeing a movie that is in a genre other than horror or action. This is fairly troubling to me, because I have written seven text games in an attempt to get through the million words one must write before the real writing can begin, and I was completely oblivious to something that has a fair amount of acceptance among readers and writers of static fiction. I’m not sure if I have to start over, or what.

At the same time, the thought of joining a writing class or workshop or whatnot doesn’t appeal to me. I have always justified a lack of formal training by the fact that text game players don’t pull punches, and neither do the posters on one particular website that I admin. The happy compromise might be to read more books, books that are considered the classics of the English language, and make it known that I crave (and am extremely appreciative of) the kind of feedback that Jimmy wrote for NTTS. I can’t say I know what the end game of all this text game writing is – I don’t think I’ll ever be good enough to make a livable wage as a writer – but that doesn’t mean that I don’t want to get significantly better.

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