By the way, Ophelia is pregnant...

I wrote this in 2008 and put it up on my old website. But now I realize my old website is no longer there. So here it is again:

Has anyone noticed that Ophelia is pregnant? In all the productions of Hamlet that I've seen, she is interpreted as an innocent girl in love with the doomed Prince. He breaks her heart, and her sanity goes with it. She drowns herself out of madness.

But maybe her madness has method to it. In Ophelia's first scene (I, iii), her brother Laertes warns her to beware of Hamlet's affection for her

"For Hamlet and the trifling of his favor,
Hold it a fashion and a toy in blood...
no more."

In other words: the Prince is toying with you. Ophelia demurs ("No more but so?") but appears to submit to her brother's wishes.

Later in the same scene, Ophelia's father Polonius complains,

"'Tis told me, he hath very oft of late
Given private time to you, and you yourself
Have of your audience been most free and bounteous."

That is, "You've been spending a lot of time alone with this guy," with a hint of "you've been giving him too much." Ophelia, in the time-honored tradition of daughters lying to fathers, claims the relationship is completely innocent: "he hath importun'd me with love / In honorable fashion."

In II, ii, while pretending to be mad, Hamlet warns Polonius that "Conception is a blessing, but not as your daughter may conceive - friend look to't'.
[Thanks to reader Winnie H for this point.]

Then, as Carol Malone notes in her blog post about this very article, Polonius observes,

"How pregnant sometimes his replies are!" (II.II, 220)

If the audience thinks Ophelia's pregnant -- having her put her hand on her belly once in Act I will do it -- then having Hamlet pun on "conceive" and then having Polonius obliviously say Hamlet's replies are "pregnant" -- well, the groundlings are elbowing each other in the ribs at this point.

Act III kicks it up a notch. In III:i, Hamlet probably overhears the King and Polonius setting Ophelia to spy on him. (I say probably, because all that's needed is for Hamlet to enter seven lines before he speaks; that explains why he turns on her.) Ophelia listens to his famous so-called soliloquy. Then he pretends to notice her for the first time, and says, with beautiful poetry and really amazing viciousness:

Nymph, in thy orisons
be all my sins remembered.

Orisons are prayers: "Girl, remember all my sins in your prayers." This could mean just, "Pray for me," but Shakespeare's slyer than that. How can she remember his sins, unless they sinned together?

(It's not a soliloquy, as David Ball notes in his excellent book Backwards and Forwards; it's a monologue. Hamlet knows she's listening. He even calls death, "The bourne from which no traveler returns" but he knows better. His father has bloody well returned from it!)

Hamlet really lays into Ophelia in III:i, ending by telling her, "To a nunnery, go!" In high school they tell you that "nunnery" was slang for a whorehouse, but it is also, more literally, an excellent place for a family to send a pregnant, unmarried noblewoman. The nuns will take care of her, and keep her out of sight, and the baby can be handed off to someone else to raise.

But it is the mad songs that Ophelia sings in IV:7 that really give away her secret. More than half of her songs are songs of mourning; after all, Hamlet has just killed Ophelia's father. That might be why Ophelia warns, "Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we may be." After all, she is no longer the daughter of the King's chamberlain; she is now only the daughter of a dead old man. But perhaps she knows all too well what she soon may be, for shortly she sings:

Tomorrow is St. Valentine's day
All in the morning betime
And I a maid at your window
To be your Valentine.

Then up he rose and donn'd his clothes
and dupp'd the chamber door;
Let in the maid, that out a maid
Never departed more.

Why is Ophelia singing about a maid seduced by her lover? Aside from the songs of mourning, all her songs are songs of betrayed love. A few lines later, she is singing an even more pointed song:

Quoth she, "Before you tumbled me,
You promis'd me to wed."
He answers:
"So would I ha'done, by yonder sun,
An thou hadst not come to my bed."

It is hard to avoid the thought that Hamlet has seduced and abandoned her.

When Ophelia returns, she has gathered herbs. "There's rosemary, that's for remembrance; pray you love, remember..." The various herbs have symbolic meanings well-documented in the scholarship, but the only herb she intends for herself is rue: "...there's rue for you, and here's some for me; we may call it herb of grace o'Sundays; O, you must wear your rue with a difference."

The symbolic meaning of rue is regret. Ophelia has much to rue, but the symbolic meaning is not the only one. The herb rue (ruta graveolens, aka Herb-of-Grace) is a powerful abortifacient. My herbiary notes that rue is "Lethally toxic, do not use during pregnancy."

Herbal abortifacients are mild poisons. You poison yourself to the point where your body decides it's too sick to support the growing embryo, and rejects it. If you miscalculate in one direction, continued pregnancy; in the other direction, you die. No one would take rue as a poison; it's an ugly way to go. Presumably Shakespeare would have given Ophelia something painless if she had intended to poison herself; hemlock, say.

A girl who has been seduced and abandoned need fear no more than a broken heart, provided there is no evidence of her shame. But if she is pregnant, then there is no way to hide what she has done, unless she can abort the child, or kill herself. And, indeed, shortly thereafter, Ophelia drowns herself.

The conventional interpretation is that Hamlet has broken her heart and killed her father. But the play seems to suggest strongly that Hamlet has seduced her, and to hint that she is pregnant as well.

It is not hard to imagine Ophelia falling in love with the romantic Prince, and giving in to his passions. He has promised to marry her, and it is not an impossible promise. The Queen later says of Ophelia (V: 2) "I hop'd thou shouldst have been my Hamlet's wife." Ophelia might well have hoped to become Queen when Hamlet ascended the throne, as his uncle Claudius has promised.

Hamlet has been away at Wittenberg long enough for Claudius to murder Hamlet's father and then to marry his mother Gertrude, and then for the news to reach Hamlet. Presumably this would be a few months at least, long enough for Ophelia to know she's pregnant. When he returns, she is hoping he'll do the right thing.

But Hamlet rejects her, kills her father, and to destroy all hope, is sent by King Claudius to England to be executed. What will become of the mother of the doomed prince's bastard? There is only one way to preserve her honor, and she takes it.

The point is, the next time someone puts on Hamlet, Ophelia really ought to be showing. Okay?

NOTES: A reader writes in to remind me just how specific Gertrude is when she later describes Ophelia's suicide -- as if she saw it, but did nothing about it. That would make perfect sense if Gertrude knew Ophelia's problem, and agreed that suicide was her only real option.

Amy Aldro writes in to point out that the heroine of The Rape of Lucrece "kills herself after Tarquin rapes her to preserve her honour." So it's a theme Shakespeare is familiar with.

Autumn S points out that during the play Ophelia says it has been "Twice two months" since his father's death. After four or more months of being pregnant, would people not begin to notice the pregnant belly that she had?

Well, it could be that Ophelia is showing, and people are talking around it; it could also be that Ophelia's pregnancy is not so obvious in an Elizabethan dress.

Jack K writes in:

Parts of what is said to the queen by a gentleman may also imply that there is talk of Ophelia being pregnant with Hamlet's child. Especially if she is singing in public the things she later sings in that scene.

Gentleman:

She speaks much of her father; says she hears
There's tricks i' the world, and hems, and beats her heart;
Spurns enviously at straws; speaks things in doubt,
That carry but half sense: her speech is nothing,
Yet the unshaped use of it doth move
The hearers to collection; they aim at it,
And botch the words up fit to their own thoughts;
Which, as her winks, and nods, and gestures yield them,
Indeed would make one think there might be thought,
Though nothing sure, yet much unhappily.
'Twere good she were spoken with; for she may strew
Dangerous conjectures in ill-breeding minds.

I.e. "Her crazy talk is giving people ideas; tell her to cut it out." He's a bit vague about what sort of ideas, but note the "ill-breeding minds." Shakespeare was super fond of double-entendres. Only ill-bred people would gossip about Ophelia; but maybe she's been breeding, and that's the problem.

 

Vibe Coding in Claude

 I've been messing around with vibe coding in Claude in Godot, Python and Javascript. Some observations:

1. This is a fantastic resource for someone who hasn't really coded since RAM was measured in KB and cell phones were bricks you could use in a street fight. 

2. However, Claude does not always get it right. I had to do about as much debugging as I would normally have done for a chunk of code that size. Fortunately, you can tell Claude what the bug is and Claude will identify the error. Unfortunately, Claude may be wrong about that, too. 

3. Claude's code is not elegant -- it does kludgy things like put a "goto" at the end of every branch of an if/elseif/else structure rather than just putting one goto after the structure. Yecch.

4. These are tiny stretches of code. I have doubts about how well Claude would handle a bigger coding project. But a programmer could probably use it to generate bits and pieces of code more quickly.

5. Technology has rarely reduced the amount of work. It has increased the productivity of that work. Since the arrival of personal computers, there aren't fewer people in offices, there are more. Programming itself has gone through multiple iterations of automation. Assembly language was a way to automate machine language. Programming languages were a way to automate assembly language. Scripting (in various environments such as game engines) is a way to automate programming. I suspect we won't need fewer programmers, we'll just have more complex software for the same price.

The talk was fun!

 

I'm giving a talk!

 

I'm giving a talk tomorrow at Cinesite in Montreal about "What Game Devs Should Know about Narrative." (You can still buy a ticket! 5 places left.) We're going to play a round of Ludonarrative Resonance. As I've mentioned before, this is a game where you draw cards for Player Character, Situation, Goal and Mechanic, and you have to make up a story that works within those parameters.

Tomorrow's cards are:

Player character

• An apologetic Englishman
• A beginning witch
• A misunderstood monster
• An addicted detective
• An escaped android
• A sulky teenager
• A new vampire
• An orphan girl

Situation

• A building with a secret
• Zombie apocalypse
• A decayed city in a faithless empire
• Paris in the 1920s, sort of
• Alien invasion
• A forgotten town
• Renaissance Florence
• Civil war

Goal

• Escape
• Break the cycle
• Bring your beloved back
• Bring back the Old Gods
• Infiltrate the Organization
• Get home in time
• Reveal the Truth
• Crush your enemies, see them driven before you, etc.

Mechanic

• Deck Builder
• Time Loop
• Romance Sim
• City Builder
• Rhythm
• Shmup
• Metroidvania
• Roguelike
• Soulslike
• Crafting

I did this a while ago with a large group, and one person kinda monopolized the conversation, so this time I'm making teams of four, and each team can pitch their idea.

Additional rules are: 

• you can interpret the words on your card however you like
• if you absolutely hate your combination of cards, you may throw out ONE card and replace it with something better that you made up.

What do you think? What cards am I missing?

I didn't come here for an argument

 I was listening to Julius Kuschke's Narrascope 2019 talk about interactive dialogue systems, and it occurred to me that we don't see enough dialogue systems where you get at least one of the options almost as soon as the other person starts talking. Because, let's face it, people do not listen very well. Sometimes they're just waiting until the other person stops talking so they can say what they planned to say all along, and some don't wait. 

Firewatch gives you dialogue options before your dispatcher is done talking. But the conversations are fairly slow and thoughtful. It's not really the cut and slash of repartee.

Obviously, this sort of system requires a bit more programming (gasp!) and the conversations have to be designed more carefully. But it does eliminate those dreadful pauses that kill the momentum in most conversations with NPCs. 

I'd love to see a dialogue system where individual responses pop onscreen as the NPC's dialogue triggers them, so your "yeah yeah yeah whatever here's what I want" response might pop up immediately, while an emotional response to the NPC's heartbreaking dilemma might require listening to their whole speech. 

What would be superfun would be the occasional dialogue option that the NPC interrupts, but that's probably too much to ask. 

Conversational Combat?

Dialogue is a core narrative delivery system in most narrative games. However, games rarely offer players dialogue choices that matter. Cutscenes can be lovely, but the player can’t interact with them, just watch and enjoy them. Branching dialogue is normally only informative – the player can find out various bits of information about the world and the characters if they are so inclined. 

At a basic level, dialogue choices are expensive because you have to record and animate content that the player may never see. Producers hate that. 

Game designers often want to minimize dialogue, especially cutscenes. After all, as you’ve probably heard before, “It’s not a movie, it’s a game.” 

Early on in the development of South of Midnight, our creative director insisted that he only wanted 1% of the game to be cutscenes. (What he wanted those scenes to do seemed like it was going to take much more than 1% of the game, and in fact the game ended up more like 8%-10% cutscenes.)

Informative branching dialogue involves more button-pressing than cutscenes. But it usually requires no thought on the part of the player. You can just click through as many dialogue options as you like, and at the end of it, you’ll get a new objective in your journal.

If you’re lucky, you might be able to sell your colleagues on purely expressive choices, where you can choose what your character says, but only so long as it has no effect on anyone but the player. In Kentucky Route Zero, for example, dialogue choices are there solely to allow you to define your instance of the main character. You can pick any dialogue option, but only you will ever care about it. This can go awry. In a certain well-liked RPG, I picked all the nastiest responses. NPCs never reacted negatively to them. They certainly didn't tell me to eff off and come back when I had a better attitude. I felt betrayed and stopped playing the game.

(By the way, I'm not against purely expressive dialogue choices. I pitched an expressive dialogue system on a game I was narrative directing. The main character could say her dialogue angrily, sarcastically, or hurt. The next NPC line would respond to that emotion. The idea got cut for scope.)

The shame of it is that good dialogue is dramatic. My definition of a drama is that at least one, but hopefully both characters are asking the other for something, and aren't getting it, and don't want to give the other person what they are asking for. Dramatic dialogue is dialogue where someone is trying to get something from someone else by talking. The scene is over when they get it, or give up on getting it.

A dramatic scene is, therefore, a form of combat. Each character can win or lose the conversation. 

But it is almost never a form of combat in games. Why? Because we feel that it’s too much to ask of the player to listen to the NPC and make their dialogue choices accordingly. I mean, what happens if they fail the conversation? No, no, better to put it in a cutscene or an in-game scene you can’t fail.

It’s possible to find examples of “conversational combat,” but they’re rare. 

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided gives you five conversations you can succeed or fail at. For example, you need to get into the morgue in the police station. You can talk a desk cop named Wayne Haas into letting you in there. 

You succeed by realizing he’s motivated by guilt for killing a fifteen-year-old kid pursuant to an order that Adam Jensen, the hero, refused to do. But you can’t just take one consistent tack in the conversation. Depending on what he says, your best choice may be to absolve him of his guilt, confront him with it, or plead for him to cut you some slack.

The "social boss battles" in DE:MD aren't easy. I beat Wayne Haas, but there was at least one I did not beat. .

Deus Ex as a franchise is famous for giving players multiple ways to accomplish missions, so while you can fail the conversation with Wayne, it does not block your progression. You can still sneak into the morgue through the air vents, or, y'know, simply slaughter everyone. 

But this is not an ideal model for games. Offering the player two separate ways to do something is expensive. It’s the sort of thing that will get cut when you inevitably scope the game down. 

But if we adopt a different paradigm, it’s simple to provide dialogue choices that don’t require any branching narrative. That is to treat conversation as just another form of combat.

We expect combat sequences to challenge us. If there is no way to fail a combat mission, it’s not a game, it’s a walking simulator. What happens when you get killed in a combat mission? You go back to a checkpoint.

If we adopt this paradigm, then what happens when you fail a conversational combat? No problem. You go back to a checkpoint. You can try a slightly different or a very different strategy. You can avoid the dialogue choices that got you “killed.” 

Obviously this is much, much cheaper than providing an alternate way to fulfill the mission.

In turn, this allows the conversational combat to have varying degrees of difficulty. We know the player is sooner or later going to make the right choices. So we don’t have to make it obvious which they are. To make it fair, we need to give the player enough information to make an intelligent choice. 

But we don’t even need to make it fair. Combat in, say, Dark Souls isn’t fair. Some of the encounters are designed so that you will only know there’s a guy hiding behind that pillar with a crossbow once he kills you. 

In conversational combat, that could mean introducing a ruthless, cold-hearted killer who, surprise!, gets very upset at the thought that you might have been mean to a puppy. How could you have known? You couldn’t. But now you do.

After all, real people are not logically consistent. 

Making conversations into combat has some key benefits. It means that players will be more inclined to pay attention to who they’re talking to and what they’re saying. They can’t just wait for the recap in the journal. It also means that they can be longer and richer, because the player is playing them rather than watching them. It’s a game, you know, not a movie.

What are some other good examples of conversations you can fail?

The Dawn of Everything

Normally I blog about creative writing, but this was a great book:

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is one of those books that convincingly rejiggers your entire understanding of something.Charles C. Mann's 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus convinced me that the Americas were heavily populated before diseases wiped out 95% of Native Americans. Back in the day, Robert T. Bakker's The Dinosaur Heresies convinced me that dinosaurs were warm-blooded and had feathers.

Here, the authors take aim at the idea that human societies inexorably grow from small bands of egalitarian hunter-gatherers to grain-based dictatorial bureaucratic states. Turns out the archeological record is full of bureaucratic states like Ur that were egalitarian and not dictatorial. Living at the same time as the brutal, dictatorial Aztecs were the Tlaxcala, who had a form of repubic; the people of Teohuatican avoided building temples and instead built housing. Peoples at all levels of social organisation have rejected big men. Iroquois leaders had no power to compel their people to do anything. Some hunter-gatherer bands mock the best hunters. Other people, like the native peoples of Southern California, have gone to great lengths to avoid building up surpluses of resources, and so have made war useless. Many peoples avoided agriculture for thousands of years even though they knew perfectly well how to do it.

Turns out folks are pretty smart and self-aware, and Western civilization is not the culmination of knowledge, but merely one particular way of living that has its pros and cons.

If you're looking for another "big think book," this is it.

View all my reviews

Dansky's Book

My dear friend,  the legendary Richard Dansky, has published The Video Game Writer's Guide to Surviving an Industry That Hates You. Richard has been at this for two decades. If you're a videogame writer or (Lord help you) an aspiring videogame writer, you need this book!

Most of it is, like it says on the tin, about surviving as a video game writer. And you can tell from the title that he pulls no punches. But he has an interesting tool for finding a character's voice:  write down ten words the character likes to say. Now write down ten words the character would never say. Let these guide you as you write the character.

I wrote a few hundred lines for a sound set for a new character. Our peerless editor and fellow writer Alexia pointed out that maybe 20% of those lines were generic. Any of our characters could say them.

In a shooter, that's inevitable to some extent. There are only so many ways someone can say "reloading!" But wherever possible, you want lines that only could come out of that character's mouth. 

It is a very high standard, and it is a mostly thankless standard. Your game designers will not complain if all your lines are generic -- they'd be happy if the character said "reloading" only one way. The artists won't care. And most players won't notice.

But players will appreciate it, even if they don't notice it. The characters will sparkle a little more. They will enjoy playing them more.

And a few of them will make some fun YouTubes out of them.

And the challenge makes us better writers. I want my writers to treat the dialog as if we're shooting for Game of the Year. It will make the game a little better, but it will make their writing much better. It's the last few reps, when your muscles are burning, that build more strength.