On Bad Choices

I watched yet another TV story where a (glamorous, sympathetic) core cast person refuses to take down a huge villain because it would hurt one person they've come to care about. (The Man in the High Castle, with the radiant Alexa Davalos.) This is of course presented as the sympathetic choice to make: naturally Juliana chooses the person we've seen over the hundred thousand whose faces we never saw.

The episode, like so many stories in American dramatic fiction, rejects "the greater good" as cynical, or inhumane. We're told to reject "the ends justify the means," as if it's morally purer to let bad things happen to other people (you don't know) so long as you don't yourself personally pull the lever on the trolley track to kill (someone you do know). Stories tell us how we're supposed to act. Ours tell us that we shouldn't make the effort to imagine all those other people, we should just focus on the few we know.

So guess what? People grow up and think they are right to refuse to sacrifice themselves or theirs. They've been told they shouldn't have to, and it is monstrous to expect them to. Now we have a society where people won't, for example, vaccinate their kids because, hey, it's their kids, and who cares about "herd immunity"? How dare anyone expect them to consider all those immunocompromised kids they've never met? They should only think about their kids.

(I'm ignoring all the reasons why they should do it for their own kids' sake. We also tell stories where the scientists are wrong and the conspiracy theorists are right and the hero wins by trusting his gut. What do experts know, anyway?)

We watched a Japanese anime movie (was it Your Name?), and when the heroine realized that she would have to die to save her town, it was not presented as a difficult choice. OF COURSE you would sacrifice your life for others. What kind of monster are you? How could you even live with yourself if you didn't? 

 When the authorities in Fukushima needed help cleaning up the reactor, local old people volunteered, because otherwise young people would have to do it. Americans used to make those choices, too (e.g. the Battle of Midway), but then, they made those choices in their movies (Casablanca). If they made Casablanca today, Rick would go off with Ilsa, and Victor Laszlo would be presented as a callous stiff. Of course she goes off with Rick. He's the hero! 

Yes, of course, characters in dramas have to be able to make bad choices. If Carrie had stuck with Aidan, that would have been the end of Sex and The City. My beef is that this kind of choice is (a) not surprising any more and (b) almost always presented as the righteous thing to do.

What if Joel, at the end of The Last of Us, had chosen the greater good? Would that have been an unsatisfying ending? Or an even darker, more dramatic ending? (The answer is left as an exercise.)

Stories have consequences. We should consider them when we make up new stories to tell.

It's a cool Odyssey, but it missed some very cool things in Homer's Odyssey

We went to see Christopher Nolan's Odyssey last night. It's a big movie, with big storms, big giants, and big emotions. It's a sad movie about Odysseus's guilt over the rape of Troy. We enjoyed it. It has some really cool ideas, like exactly how Circe turns his men into pigs, and what a cyclops might look like. It has a few things to say about the horrors of war. 

It's missing some things I particularly like about The Odyssey.

The first one is Odysseus, the character. Odysseus is the first modern hero. The first one you could invite to dinner. He wouldn't show up on time, but boy would he have a story. ("I know I'm late, but hear me out, okay?") He is not a classical hero, all force and bravery. He is "that man skilled in all ways of contending." He's a trickster.

Odysseus shows up on his island, Ithaca, and the first person he meets is a shepherd boy. Knowing that truth is dangerous, he immediately concocts an outlandish story involving being an Egyptian merchant, or something, who was kidnapped by pirates, but escaped. 

The shepherd boy is the goddess Athena in disguise. She loves that he's a canny, outrageous liar. "If I were a mortal," she tells him, "I would want to be you."

Odysseus is the guy who gets himself thrashed by his own troops so he can go over to the Trojan side pretending to be a Greek deserter, so he can see the citadel from the inside.

Odysseus is the guy who really, really doesn't want to go on the Trojan War. It's not only a bad idea militarily, but a war for a stupid reason – to get Menelaus's wife back, after she ran off with her lover, Paris. So when the Greek generals show up to draft him, he's pretending to be crazy, plowing up his own vineyards. Only when the Greeks throw his infant son in front of the plow does he stop the oxen and go, yeah, okay, you got me, I'll go.

Odysseus is also the guy who spends seven years on Kalypso's island, schtupping the gorgeous immortal nymph, but also begging her and any god who will listen to let him sail home.

He is also the guy who is so arrogant that he just has to tell the cyclops Polyphemus who it was put his eye out, condemning his crew to death and himself to ten years of wandering.

He's probably not Matt Damon. He's more Brad Pitt. 

How about Penelope? She is worthy of him. She fends off the suitors for ten years, claiming she'll marry when she finishes Odysseus's father's funeral shroud, which she has to weave herself. Only she's unweaving it at night. (That's in the movie, at least.) And then one day an old man shows up, and tells her, Oh, yeah, your husband is alive, I saw him a little while back. And what does she do with this information? She immediately tells the suitors she'll marry any man who can string Odysseus's bow and do his arrow stunt.

That seems a bit odd, huh? Until you realize that she knows perfectly well who the old man is. But they can't talk freely because they are surrounded by traitorous handmaidens. And she knows that putting a bow in her husband's hands is the only way to give him an advantage over the dozens of suitors who would kill him if they could.

And then, after he has duly slaughtered his enemies, does she fall into his arms? Nope. She says, "so great to see you back, my love, but would you please move my bed?" And he says, "I can't, because one of the bedposts is the stump of a tree." And only then does she fall into his arms.

Which means that she was totally prepared for the possibility that she just helped some total rando slaughter all the suitors. And would have been happy to take the win, if that's all it was. 

She is a woman "skilled in all ways of contending."

Athena, meanwhile, is not a goddess of compassion. (None of the Greek gods are really big into compassion. They are mostly terrible, selfish, spoiled people.) She runs interference for him. Warns him about Circe and gives him magic to prevent Circe from turning him into a pig. Disguises him as an old man so the suitors won't recognize and murder him. And once he really gets the suitor-slaughtering going, she joins the fun.

These are the characters I love in The Odyssey. 

It's a lovely movie, Christopher Nolan's Odyssey. It is less an adaptation of Homer's Odyssey, and more Christopher Nolan hijackingThe Odyssey to tell a story about guilt and trauma. 

Which is totally legit. That's how culture works. You're allowed to bend the old stories to your purposes. Nothing is preventing folks from going back and reading Homer's original story.

(You're also allowed to cast a black woman as Helen. The people in the movie are not the actual people in the story. They are actors playing the people in the story.)

There is one last thing I missed. Having blinded Poseidon's son, Polyphemus, Odysseus has to make amends with the god of the sea. You can't be a Greek and have the sea-god hating you, now, can you? So what does he have to do? Not "sail off into the West." Nope.

What he has to do is take an oar and walk inland so far that someone asks him what the hell is that thing he's carrying? Someone who has never seen a boat, in other words. And there he must sacrifice to the sea god.

It's a great story. Someone could make a really cool movie about that.

Trigger Warning: British Politics

The following has almost nothing to do with this blog, except that politics are a form of theatre, and Britain is hilarious:For those of you just tuning in, Nigel Farage got $5 million from a possibly shady Brit living in Thailand shortly before he ran for Parliament. People are irked. So he has decided to resign from Parliament and run again so, when he's re-elected, he can say, "The people have decided, so shut up."

However, since 2 March 1623, a Member of Parliament cannot resign. Rather than simply changing the rule so that one can, Parliament decided on 30 December 1680 that an MP who accepts a position under the Crown is disqualified. So Farage will apply to King Charles to be appointed Crown Steward and Bailiff of the Chiltern Hundreds of Desborough, Burnham and Stoke. Which he can then ask King Charles to be released from, so he can run again.

The regular parties are boycotting this farce, which would guarantee Farage a win, except that a farcical candidate is running: Count Binface, a comedian who appears in public with a trash can on his head. He could potentially gather all the regular parties' votes, which would put him in Parliament and, one hopes, end Nigel Farage's political career, since how do you carry on when you lost to Count Binface? ("Yew lost to Count Binface, shut up!")

British democracy is Very Old.

(As UK PM Gordon Brown said, "when establishing the rule of law, the first five centuries are always the hardest.")

(This is what happens when your pubs have entrances six feet below street level, because the street has risen six feet since they were built.)

(Q.  How many Englishmen does it take to change a lightbulb?

A.  That lightbulb has been perfectly good for one thousand years, why would you want to change it now?)

On further research, it turns out that Count Binface has a degree in Classics from Oxford, or rather, Jonathan David Harvey, the man inside the bin, does.

In 2019 he ran for prime minister on a platform of nationalizing model railways. He used to run as Lord Buckethead, "but was forced to create a new character due to a dispute with the filmmaker Todd Durham, who owns the Buckethead character."

And this just in:  there is a rule that you may not address the House whilst wearing headgear. It's unclear whether you may sit in the House whilst wearing headgear, though. The bin sort of speaks for itself. 

The Mock Duck Trap

A goodie in the Kate Gray's Kaleidoscope interview: "write for someone who likes your game." We spend a lot of worry on, for example, making sure people do not like narrative can avoid it. In narrative games!

While there are clever ways to do that (e.g. lots of player-pulled narrative), why not write for people who do like narrative? They're most of your players, eh?

This is the Mock Duck Trap.

 

Mock duck is not the best duck. It's made of wheat gluten and oil, for vegetarians. If you owned a duck restaurant, you would not, because many folks are vegetarians, serve everyone mock duck.

(There is also mock duck made out of beef, though I am not sure why.)

After all, not that many vegetarians will choose a duck restaurant, anyway. Lisa's parents are vegetarians, and we do not at all go to Gibby's, a wonderful nearby steak house.

If you can offer duck AND mock, great, go for it! But if you have to choose, choose duck.

The peculiar way I broke into the video game industry

 A student wrote to ask me how I got into video games. It's a peculiar story, and maybe has a useful lesson.

The first time I got into video games, I was a computer science major at Yale, and one of the professors had a company making educational computer games. This was so long ago we had a serious discussion about whether we should be making games that could run in 128K of RAM, because after all, only the latest computers had that much memory. I spent a couple of summers programming games where the ant onscreen would wave its antennae around when you spelled the word "ant" correctly.

I got out of programming because I was not a great programmer. I was in the same intro computer class with Jordan Mechner, who programmed the first Prince of Persia game, so I knew what great programming looked like, and I wasn't doing it. 

(I used to work for a movie producer who stopped playing trumpet because there was this other kid in the band who played trumpet really well and he felt daunted. That kid turned out to be Wynton Marsalis.)

The second time I got into video games was 2010. I was a film and TV writer in Montreal, Canada. I had a pretty successful film and TV-writing career -- I co-wrote a locally successful movie called Bon Cop/Bad Cop, and I co-created a TV series called Naked Josh. But Montreal's English film and TV industry is a backwater of Toronto's, which is a backwater of LA. And my iceberg was melting. Film and TV production in English was moving out of Montreal for various structural reasons. I figured I could try to become a writer-director -- I have an MFA from UCLA's School of Film and Television -- or I could go into video games.

The local funding agencies were uninterested in my solo movie project, a dark little drama called Alice is Perfectly Fine Now. But Montreal, it turned out, was a hub of video games.

How to break in? I was a video game player, but I'd never written any video games. 

Well, I figured the first step was to find out what video game writing was. So, through the Writer's Guild of Canada, I organized a panel discussion of video game writers to come talk to screenwriters about what they do. That sounds involved, but it was not super difficult. I asked my intern (I had an intern!) to find a venue, and McGill had a spare auditorium. I got in touch with Jason Della Rocca, who was running the Montreal chapter of the International Game Developer's Association, and he scared up my panel of writers: Mary DeMarle, Nina Sund, Stephan Wark and the always-memorable Richard Rouse III. I got the word out through the WGC.

Here's the part where there's a lesson:  no one asked me to organize the panel discussion. I did not have an official position in the WGC. The panel discussion was not part of a series of panel discussions through an organization. I just talked to people and they liked the idea and supported it.

We had a great panel discussion, and off everyone went.

Some time later, someone was starting up a video game company and asked Jason Della Rocca who could write for them. And he said, Oh, talk to Alex, he wrote Bon Cop. 

Some time after that, Compulsion Games was looking for a video game writer for their game Contrast, and they asked Jason Della Rocca, and he told them, Oh, talk to Alex, he wrote Bon Cop. And so I started writing video games. 

Like a lot of video game writers, my path isn't one that would work for someone else. You can't set out to write a locally famous movie and then transition in. There were fewer video game writers relative to the number of jobs then, and companies were less suspicious of movie writers. Quebec is unique in having its own successful provincial movie industry -- mostly in French, but Bon Cop / Bad Cop was half in French, as you might have guessed. 

But there is no good path for video game writers, anyway. I know writers who started as game journalists, and that job barely even exists any more. I know writers who came in through QA, and QA is a highly skilled discipline now, not an entry level job. I know writers who came in through community management. And so on. As a hiring manager, I've hired writers who made their own text-heavy video games, and that might still be a path. But there's no "path to colonel."

The lesson is: keep pushing on doors till one opens. I started out in LA writing screenplays. When LA didn't love me, I moved to Quebec, and Quebec was really kind to me for a decade. When screenwriting faltered, I moved to games. 

I wouldn't recommend trying to get into video game writing right now. Blood is running in the streets, and half my friends are out of work. As I used to tell people about screenwriting, if you can be happy doing literally anything else, do that. The people who succeed will be people who have to be writers. But, on the other hand, there will be people who have to be writers, who won't succeed. Failure is an option.

That said, I know two extremely enterprising young women who broke in recently. (I know they're enterprising because after they pinged me for a coffee, I talked to other writers, and each of these young woman had had coffee with each of my friends, too. Most people will give you a coffee. When I was coming up, most people gave me a coffee.)

Long term, folks are always going to want stories. Stories are hardwired into human brains. We've been telling stories since we learned to talk, and Uncle Og would tell us about that time the tiger nearly got him. AI is never going to replace story telling, because story telling is about hitting people in the feels, and AI doesn't know anything about the feels.

But the form those stories take will change. In Shakespeare's time, if you wanted to reach people, and possibly make a bit of scratch, you wrote plays. In Lord Byron's time, you could make bank as a poet. In Charles Dickens' time, novels. In the early 20th Century, radio was a thing. In the late 20th Century, TV. If you are agnostic about what medium you're going to tell stories in, you can probably find a medium that needs writers. 

Good luck.

People are Liking The Caribou Trail

Lisa and I wrote a game* called The Caribou Trail about the Royal Newfoundland Regiment's experiences at Gallipoli in 1915. It came out today!

Console Creatures says, "Every one in a while, a video game releases -- usually an indie -- that instantly becomes a 'must-play.'"

Mobile Syrup (a Canadian site, natch) calls it "a brilliant tribute". 

(UPDATE) And here's what some Steam reviewers said:

"A beautiful game with a touching and heartbreaking story" 
"touched my heart 10/10" 
"incredibly moving" 
"hits the feels" 
"💔" 
"Firewatch" 
"Edith Finch"

*I was Narrative Director, Lisa was Principal Writer, and a friend of ours named John Rumsby (writer of INHUMAN RESOURCES) wrote a bunch on it, too

Luke Plunkett & A Probably Unpopular Opinion About Mixtape

Luke Plunkett nails my mixed feelings about Mixtape: https://aftermath.site/mixtape-review-game-90s/.

So first of all, a ton of people love Mixtape, and God bless them and the game makers. It's hard to make any game, and Mixtape has lovely moments. 

But I feel it could have been stronger and truer. And I think it's worth looking at how. There's no point in dragging a trash fire. But when something gets so many things right, it's worth looking at what it doesn't get right, and learning from that.

Mixtape feels a bit... vague to me? And a bit ... off?

The characters are lovingly drawn, and the story feels like it's coming out of someone's personal experience. So that's great. There's a lot of lovely bespoke gameplay -- the skateboarding, Kaiju mode, running and flying...

But... where are we?

American Graffiti felt real and strange and true and iconic because it was a keenly observed love letter to George Lucas's senior year in 1962 Modesto. 

Dazed & Confused, same, but Richard Linklater's love-and-hate letter to 1976 in East Texas. You can tell Dazed and Confused is true because of the subplot of the seniors attacking the freshmen with wooden paddles: violent, unjust assaults that are somehow approved by the whole town. No writer would make that up -- it's too incredible not to be true. 

Oh, and Metropolitan, about rich WASPy prep school kids in Manhattan in the 1980s. I went to Dalton, which was Jewish, not WASPy, but I was in plays with those kids, and went to college with them, and yes they are like that.

Fiction, if you're not careful, can be too symmetrical. Too smooth. Everything all ties together, with no loose ends. Everything adds up to something.

Reality has an awkward shape. Reality is assymmetrical. Reality has rough edges. Lots of things happen in reality that make no apparent sense and add up to nothing. It's only in memory, and fiction, that things add up.

("A portrait," said John Singer Sargent, "is a picture where something is wrong with the mouth.")

In a fairy story, or a puzzle game, we're not looking for reality. We want symmetry and sense. But in a naturalistic story, the creator has to walk a fine line between nothing adding up (and then it's not a story) and things adding up too much.

It sounds like a paradox, but specificity is what makes a work of fiction feel universal. A keenly observed, specific portrait feels more human and true than an average. 

By "true" and "specific" I don't mean "literally true." Lord of the Rings is specific, and so feels universal, but not because elves and orcs really exist. It has a carefully curated assymmetry. There is evil in the world, but the evil isn't a single entity. There's Sauron and then there's Saruman, who wants to be Sauron. And then there's Smaug, who is just hungry for gold. And then there's Shelob, who is just hungry. 

So, Mixtape. I didn't grow up in the '90s, so I'll take Luke's word for it. But I feel like there is an odd blurriness to Mixtape. I don't know where I am. I don't know what year it is in the 1990s. I don't know where in NoCal I am. Cassandra is going off to an unnamed college that looks a bit like ... UCLA, maybe? And I don't hear California cadences in the dialogue. 

(I spent tenth grade in Palo Alto, California, and I've got a brother who lives up in the dry hills East of Sacramento. I lived in LA for fifteen years, in the shadow of the 10/405 interchange, and for a while I was married to a gal who grew up at the northern end of the Sacramento Valley, near Red Bluff. I've heard a lot of Californian.)

Mixtape was made by Australians. Luke Plunkett thinks it shows, and I feel the same. Is this California from personal observation? Or from Fast Times at Ridgemont High? Or is it really Australia, but through a California photo filter? This is maybe just my imagination, but if I try to hear what the characters are saying with an Australian accent, the dialogue starts to ring truer. Underneath the sk8ter grunge, it's got that wry, deprecatory, articulate looseness that is so Ozzie, and so not the California I know. 

Why would a team of Australians make a game about California? Did someone tell them that no one would want to play a game about Australians growing up in the 1990s? 

"Okay," you say, "But you, Alex, wrote a game set in Britain, where you never lived, and another one set in an unnamed state in the Deep South that somehow has bayous AND mountains AND caverns. And didn't you literally just have a game come out about Newfoundlanders at Gallipoli in 1915?"

Yep. We made We Happy Few not out of any direct, personal observation of Britain in the 1960s, but out of all the British media we scarfed up over the years:  Monty Python, A Clockwork Orange, 1984, Brave New World, The Beatles, Gilbert & Sullivan, Blow Up, Austin Powers etc. etc. It was always intended to be a fairy tale. By some miracle, British folk felt we got something right. 

Sometimes a foreigner sees something clearly that a local doesn't notice. Wim Wenders' Paris, Texas finds some of the oddness in Texas that only a German might call out. Blow Up is a snapshot of Swinging London by an Italian, and Austin Powers is a pastiche of Bond movies (and Blow Up!) written by and starring a Canadian.

When we turned to make South of Midnight, there was a real concern that we were a largely French Canadian team making a game set in the Deep South. But the creative director, David Sears, grew up in the Deep South, and the game was his vision and his memories. And Lisa grew up in Texas and Louisiana. Bunny Flood is a lot of the moms of the girls Lisa went to school with. We went on multiple research trips down there to get the feel of the land. And we hired writers and consultants to give us some insights -- some specificityand asymmetry. We worked with Jeremy Love (Bayou) on the monsters. We had a folklorist come and tell the team folktales. We read a lot of Southern Gothic literature. But there, too, we weren't trying to make an accurate slice-of-life about growing up in the Deep South. We were telling a fairy story. 

And The Caribou Trail is a fairy story too, and, well, no one at all is still around who went to Gallipoli with the Royal Newfoundland Regiment. 

I'm glad Mixtape is having its moment. It gets so many things right.

But ... what if they'd set it in Oz! Couldn't it have been so much more specific? Sharp, painful, true and hilarious? 

A rose by any other name would vote for AOC.

The WaPo has a fun article showing the rightward or leftware tilt of a bunch of first and last names. It's not super-surprising that names common among Black and Jewish people tend to belong to Democrats, and names common to White Anglo-Saxon people tend to belong to Republicans. My name, Epstein, is Jewish, and wouldn't you know it, the name Epstein tilts hugely Democratic. Alex tilts a little bit blue. 

Where this survey is useful narratively is if you are naming a fictional character. If you want your reader to feel like your female NPC is 50ish, call her Lisa. 40ish, call her Jennifer. I often check out the US Census charts to see what a common name was around when my NPC was born.

Similarly, naming a character Brock or Darlene suggests a Republican, while Gracie and Mattie are probably Democrats. 

Handy, huh?