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?

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. 

Ludonarrative Resonance: The Game

 All the ganz mespuchah came to town for the office summer party, and we had narrative workshops. These were in no way silly fun games, they were Very Serious. Okay, they were silly and fun, but they were also serious.

One game we like to play I dubbed Ludonarrative Resonance. I don't claim it's original -- my friend Shelly made a similar game for movie pitches, and probably lots of people have something like it. It's a card game for breaking folks out of their familiar tropes.

What you do is you take index cards, or blank playing cards like these and separate them into four piles:  Setting, Main Character, Goal, Mechanic.

You write a mess of cards with the word Settings on their backs, for example:

• 
  Paris, in the 20's, sort of
• A city with a dark secret
• Zombie apocalypse
• The dreams of a dying scientist
• A decayed city in a faithless empire 
• A forgotten town in the Deep South
• Sparta!!!
• Renaissance Florence
• A volcano island

Then you write a bunch of cards with Main Character on the back:

• An apologetic Englishman
• Member of an arcane order of assassins
• A mysterious circus girl of unknown age
• A sly fox with poor impulse control
• The Monkey King
• A beginning witch
• A not entirely harmless lamb

Next, Goals, for example:

• Become a Real Boy
• Bring back the Old Ones
• Bring your beloved back
• Get the MacGuffin
• Survive
• Heal the monsters
• Go to there

Some of these are a bit specific; ideally the cards should be ideas you can interpret in different ways, but also evocative. By now you've probably recognized the games, movies and fairy tales I stole these from (some of which I wrote).

Finally, Mechanics:

• Social stealth: pass as one of them
• Deck builder
• Walking simulator
• Parcour
• Battle Royale
• Romance simulator
• Enter dreams and alter them
• Soulslike
• Punch them in the face
• Time loop

Now, the dealer deals three of each kind of card, and someone else picks one from each three. There shouldn't be two cards from the same source material.

Then everyone collaborates to pitch a game using the selected setting, main character, goal and mechanic.

Initially, this will seem ridiculous. But with a little thought, the ridiculous becomes plausible -- and original.

In our workshop, for example, we had:

A lamb

A volcano

Go to there

Puzzles

We ended up with the idea that The Lamb is solving puzzles to climb the volcano to get to Mary. The puzzles come from spectral lambs. Over the course of the puzzles we discover that Mary has been abusive towards the Lamb, and we're worried that we are in an allegory of someone returning to their abuser. But it turns out the Lamb is there to kill evil Mary and set the spectral lambs free.

We had:

An apologetic Englishman

A zombie apocalypse

Bring back his beloved

Social stealth

That turned into a game pitch where the apologetic Englishman has to rescue his beloved, who has become a zombie. That means he will have to infiltrate three groups:  the zombies (to get to her), the lab guys (to get the cure) and the kill teams (to prevent them from killing her before she can be turned back). Being an apologetic Englishman is a nice impediment to passing as any of these groups, and failing to pass will result in him being eaten, killed, or used as an experimental subject.

Both of those are perfectly cromulent games, right? I would at a minimum watch the trailer for these games, and probably wishlist them on Steam. 

Aside from exercising your ludonarrative muscles, which is always good, you quickly learn how many possibilities there are. When we were thinking about our next game after We Happy Few, we only seriously discussed two possibilities. We should have been discussing twenty! I mean, if you're planning to spend a couple of years making an indie game, or five or more making a AAA game, would it kill you to spend a month or two pitching crazy ideas? You don't want to be making a cookie-cutter fantasy game because that's what's at the front of your brain.

Make randomness your friend!

EDIT:  This game is probably better with small teams. Some folks like to hear themselves talk, and in large groups people are inclined to let them talk. If you have twenty people, you might want five teams of four or four teams of five, and give each team five or six minutes to come up with a pitch and two minutes to pitch it to the other teams. 

A Misconception or Two I Had About Escape Rooms

For some time, I avoided playing escape rooms. Being trapped in a room with a limited time to escape seemed stressful, and I'm really good with the amount of stress I already have in my life. 

I have since discovered that almost no escape rooms are about escaping. The genre is stuck with the name, though. 

I just finished playing a baker's dozen of escape rooms here in Montreal, courtesy of a tour run by the fine folks of Room Escape Artist. (They also run the excellent Reality Escape Pod.) They also run tours of escape rooms in various cities that are hubs of escape rooms. Turns out Montreal is one of the top eight cities in the world for escape rooms. I did not know that.

I've been intrigued by immersive experiences, including escape rooms, for a little while. There are a bunch of ways in which they are not like video games. They are local -- if you want to play an escape room, or experience immersive theater, you have to go to where it is. You can't download it. They are tactile:  you are physically in a space. There may be be actors who will improvise based on your responses. 

There are of course many ways in which escape rooms are like video games. You are the hero of your own adventure. There is a mission that only you can accomplish. There are characters who are there to help. There are obstacles, and sometimes antagonists. You have to solve puzzles. You often have to platform. You can theoretically win or lose, but you really only lose if you are dead set on testing yourself in hard mode. 

Some games are very heavy on the problem solving. Some make an effort to create a convincingly real environment that tells part of the story. Some are there more to tell an emotionally truthful story, and the puzzles are there more to engage you in the story than to present a difficult challenge.

Escape rooms have been flowering for only about the last ten years. Folks are still figuring out what the genre can do. 

According to Morty, the Yelp of escape rooms, there are on the order of fifty thousand escape rooms. 

In the past three days, I saved a magic forest, saved the world from vengeful Poseidon, released souls trapped by a witch, broken into my high school to get out of having to go to summer school, helped a Lego man succeed on his date, stopped a mad bomber, stopped a mad poisoner, helped an agent shut down a drug operation, saved another magic forest, rehabilitated myself after having been arrested for tampering with an android, and broken a curse.

Turns out, Montreal has the top-rated room in all the world, Magnifico, at Escaparium, itself probably the top escape room studio in the world. Magnifico is Not Cheap -- it's $200 Canadian, not $30-$40 Canadian like most other rooms. But it is a 2.5 hour masterpiece. The Cirque du Soleil of escape rooms. The Punchdrunk of escape rooms. It brings together stage magic, spectacular special effects, actors, puzzle-solving, wit, music and tragedy. It took me to another world, and got me in the feels.

Come on up to Montreal and check it out! We also have circuses.

Get'em While They're Hot!

Lore Should Read Like Someone Wrote It

We're working on lore for Fragpunk, and as we refine the lore pieces, one thing I keep asking the writers for is translucency. My book (now out from Routledge!) talks about "translucent liars," where you know an NPC is lying, and their lies tell you something about them. But they don't have to be lying. They can be telling the truth -- but telling it from their distinctive point of view.

That way, there's two layers of lore. One is the facts that they are presenting -- oh, there are lizard people in the hills, no one knows where they came from, don't go there or they'll eat you. The other is who the NPC is:  a cranky old blacksmith who's a little hard of hearing, who isn't getting along with his second wife, and now you know that in this culture a man can have two wives.

(They say that France is the only country where you can complain to your wife that your mistress just doesn't understand you.)

Every bit of lore should have attitude. Even if it's meant to be from an encyclopedia, who wrote it? Who was the encyclopediarian? In Samuel Johnson's dictionary, you will find this definition:

Lexicographer. n. s. A writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge...

Which defines lexicographers, but also tells you what Samuel Johnson thought of himself. 

Every bit of text in our world has an attitude. We are so used to some of them that we think they are "neutral," but the New York Times is not really neutral, and neither is the Encyclopedia Brittanica. 

So give your lore attitude, and tell us who wrote it. 

What's in the book?

Look at all the stuff you get in my new book!
Coming April 28 -- you can preorder now!