Mobile Syrup (a Canadian site, natch) calls it "a brilliant tribute".
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?
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?
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:
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.
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.
Tomorrow's cards are:
Player character
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:
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.
