Unions are good for companies, dammit

Many years ago, I was asked to fly down to Cape Town as the Head Writer on a strange sf tv show called CHARLIE JADE, along with two fellow Canadians, Sean Carley and the irrepressible Denis McGrath, whom we all miss terribly. 

It was a Canadian-South African co-production, which meant we had to hire South African writers for half the scripts. And we had a hell of a time finding good ones. We found one very fine writer, Dennis Venter, but I was never happy with the others, whose scripts we basically threw out and rewrote. (They got the credit anyway. Them's the rules.) There obviously were good ones, but not that many, and they were all busy on the soaps. 

Why couldn't we find good writers? Because the South African writers had no union.

Because the South African TV writers didn't have a strong union, they got paid almost nothing for a script. 

Like, $2,000 a pop for hourlong scripts we got $50,000 to write. You could make more money writing novels.

Novels! I wrote a novel. I've made several thousand dollars from it, mostly from the Canadian government, which pays you $250 a year if your book is in enough libraries.

Unions are good for companies. They make sure that writers can afford to write TV. Writing TV is super fun, but it is very hard work. Not in the "did anyone ask you to dig a ditch?" sweat-of-your-brown hard, but hard as in you are thinking very hard for about 16 hours a day. (Writing is not just typing.) As Head Writer, I was working more or less 6 1/2 days a week. 

If that doesn't pay enough to have a middle-class life, then would-be TV writers will go do something that will. And when you want to get your show written, you'll look around and there won't be any good writers.

Dammit, this ought to be the golden age of being a TV writer. There are more shows than ever before. Some of them have spectacular writing. How is it writers can't afford to be writers? 

Because the companies are greedy, and they're killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.

It's short-sighted. The WGA wants 2% of the profits of the shows their writers create. 2%! Fucksake. 

Do you think there's nowhere else talented writers can go? Because there is this whole other business called video games that also hires writers, and gives us paychecks all year round. Some of us are doing pretty darn well. 

I hope the WGA doesn't have to strike. But God bless them, they will. And everyone will lose a lot of work. And hopefully, the companies will come around, like they did the last time. 

You don't get what you deserve. You get what you negotiate.

Minimum Context

 We're working on an opening sequence. I proposed a couple of short scenes. Other folks came back with scenes that I felt were long and contained too much information. 

As I wrote them, my general principals in approaching the scenes are:

1.  What is the minimum context the player needs in order to understand what is going on? We need the opening sequence to tell us who the main character is, and what his relationship with the other key figures.

2.   It is usually better to provoke the player to ask a question before we answer it. We need to provide a certain minimum amount of context (see above) so the player can ask a question that makes sense. Beyond that, it's better to provoke the question and then answer it later, than to give the player information they haven't asked for yet. This keeps the player engaged -- they pull themselves into the story rather than having story pushed at them.

So long as the player isn't actually confused, let the player wonder why things are happening. 

If we provide more than the minimum context, we don't know which information is the important part. Instead of getting wrapped up in the characters, we're processing information. When we're processing information, we're not asking questions. When we're not asking questions, we're not getting engaged in the story. We're also not getting to the gameplay!

Only resolve a mystery once the resolution is more satisfying than the mystery.

ECGC 2022 How to Take and Give Notes - Alex Epstein

Looks like my talk on how to give and take creative criticism from last year's ECGC is up on YouTube. Has been since August. Who knew?

My dad's passing

My father, Howard Epstein, passed away this afternoon, peacefully, after a long struggle with Parkinson's. 

A boy from Queens, NY, Dad served in the Navy at the tail end of World War II. He used his G.I. Bill to go the Institut d'Etudes Politiques (the "Sciences Po"), coming away a lifelong francophile. 

After a stint as a reporter for the Xenia Daily Gazette (Xenia, OH, is the largest city in the US beginning with "X"), he joined Facts on File, a weekly indexed digest of international news. He became its President, starting up Checkmark Books, an imprint for dictionaries, atlases and encyclopedias, and coincidentally employing many of my friends while I was in high school. He took the company from $2 million a year to $20 million a year, before being unceremoniously fired for trying to protect his staff from layoffs during a merger. 

Dad was a mensch. I'm touched by how many people really loved him. He was a nurturing man, and took care of everyone around him. He was crazy about my mom. He liked sailboats, British roadsters, and old biplanes, though he only owned the one catboat. He appreciated good wine, and made sure his friends got enough of it. He made a hell of a ragout. 

He was working on a book about the French people who saved, or did not save, or hunted, Jewish children during the Nazi occupation of France. 

I've missed him for a while, because Parkinson's steals people from you bit by bit for a long time; his passing was a blessing. He was an atheist, but I'm not, so I get to hope he's in a place where he feels all the love he brought into the world.

Uncanny Valley

In animation there's an effect called the "uncanny valley." We have no trouble with a cartoon character. But an animated character who is too similar to a real human being, but not quite, becomes creepy. Some people think it's instinctive: one thing that looks human but isn't quite is a corpse, and it's unhealthy to be around corpses. There's an "uncanny valley" in fictional characters' personalities, too. Real people have flaws. Characters without flaws feel artificial, hence a little bit creepy. That might be why I get nervous any time there's a religious figure in a work of fiction who lives up to his religion. Someone who's wise, kind, insightful, self-deprecating, modest ... I hate this guy already. I'm just waiting for the other shoe to drop. He's probably a child molester, right? Not because religious leaders are all hypocrites, though many are, or child molesters, though a few are. But because my mind does not believe anyone that perfect exists. Either he has a deep dark terrible secret or... he's not really human.

Stretch Goal

I'm writing a graphic novel, a new medium for me. Like a novel, time in a graphic novel is infinitely stretchable and compressible. And there is no budget -- the artist can blow up the planet as easily as show someone's foot scratching an itch on their leg. But a novel is such a bigger canvas. I'm trying to pace this as fast as possible, but not faster. At least half of this thing is outside my wheelhouse, so it's all a big stretch. Wish me luck!

Some games for people who think they don't like games

I chatted with someone who's sidling into the video game industry on the strength of her superpowers in other media. She said she doesn't play games, and I said "well, what games are you playing?" She's been watching her boyfriend play brain-straining puzzle games, so I suggested that before she writes off a medium, she play different kindsa games. Here's my list of games to check out. This is a list skewed towards narrative (she's a voice director), not too difficult games, and Mac games (she has a map); I'd have made a different list for someone else. But you may dig these, too.

Mac/PC - small games
• 80 Days: based on the novel by Jules Verne, if Europe didn't colonize the world
• West of Loathing: really silly and adorable side-scrolling stick-figure Western
• Return of the Obra Dinn: puzzle game in which you must figure out how the 60 people on the Obra Dinn died, and therein lies a sea story
• Black Book: a Slavic witch on a very dubious quest. This is a game where you build your deck of powers -- a "deck-builder."
• Unpacking: A weirdly moving game in which you move into a series of new places to live. Seriously, though.
• Passage: a truly tiny free experimental game about life
• Gorogoa: a sort-of puzzle game where a story unfolds as you move pictures around
• Baba Is You: A word puzzle game. Gets difficult eventually, but you can stop any time.

Mac/PC - bigger games
• Disco Elysium -- a decayed detective trying to solve a murder gets caught up in the politics of an equally decayed Empire
• Contrast: You are the circus girl who is the invisible friend of Didi, an 8 year old trying to uncover the secrets of her past. You can become your own shadow, and walk on shadows.
• Stray: My favorite game of the past twelvemonth. You are a cat, trying to escape a city of robots.

Mac/PC - games where you have to hack and slash a bit
• Cult of the Lamb: you are a sheep trying to bring back a bloodthirsty elder god
• Boyfriend Dungeon: date your swords
• We Happy Few: three slightly horrible people try to escape an insane, groovy dystopian England.
• Banner Saga: Vikings and killer robots from space. Turn-based tactical combat, meaning that you can take as long as you like.
• Into the Breach: Fight giant bugs with mechs. Totally addictive turn-based tactical. A gem of its kind.

PC Only - small
• What Remains of Edith Finch -- What happened to the Finch family in this creepy old house?
• Journey: a mysterious character tries to get to the top of that mountain.
• Papers, Please: a depressing and powerful game about being a bureaucrat in a vaguely Eastern European dictatorship
• The Stanley Parable: an iconic game about choices
• Where the Water Tastes Like Wine: how folk tales grow

Battle of the Linguist Mages, by Scotto Moore

I'm a regular customer of Charles Stross's Laundry Files series, and I've read Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon a few times each. Oh, and Tim Powers' Declare. We went out to the countryside to read books and kayak a bit, so I spent a half an hour poking around spec fiction books on Kindle, and Battle of the Linguist Mages caught my eye because I am a sucker for historical linguistics. (Did you know that, in the absence of archeological evidence, you can make deductions about what migrating peoples lived next to each other at what time? Based on what the loan words one people took from the other look like? Because we have some good theories about how words change over time in a language, and when a loan word comes into a language, it stops changing the way words change in the old language, and starts changing the way words change in the new language. So we can say, to make up an example, the Hungarians must have brushed up against the Scythians around 800 BC. Words can get imported into a language multiple times, so in English we have dish and disc, ship and skiff, etc.) I love Kindle because I can read a free sample and then buy the book and have it RIGHT NOW. Battle of the Linguist Mages takes some language concepts, spins them into a wild adventure story, and then runs with them as far as you can. It takes off from the lands of Snow Crash and The Fifth Element and dives into a sort of contemporary Yellow Submarine sea of meta concepts, "foothills of the headlands" style. Oh, and if you're a gamer, it might tickle you where you live, in the places that Ready Player One only poked.