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.
