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More short stories I've been enjoying recently.
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"It’s not always about writing more words or drinking more coffee. Sometimes getting to the end of a novel simply takes remembering that the world is more complicated than we know, and then sticking some of those complications into the story." Applies to lots of things.
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"This post is a look at the biggest downfalls of distributed startups – specifically the rise of monoculture, siloing of the workforce, isolation of management, expense of communication and loss of group context." Lots of great points, and well-observed counters; useful reading if you only ever work from home occasionally, let alone all the time.
Within those terms, able
14 April 2013
Harrison is often called a “writer’s writer”, a compliment that can cut both ways. How does he feel about this? In reply he describes the “practice crag” found in almost every Peak District town or village. “It may not be much higher than this room,” he says, “but every single way of getting to the top of it will have been worked out over 50 or 60 years.” At the same time, there will always be “some last great problem that nobody’s solved. The guy who will solve it may not be the best climber in Britain, but the best climber in Britain will turn up one day in the summer to watch the local guy who can do it. And I always wanted to be that local guy, as a writer. To be that technical, that familiar with a certain locality, and within those terms, able.”
From M John Harrison, a life in writing, by Richard Lea.
I’m reading a lot of Harrison at the moment – and anticipating Climbers a great deal. This struck me firmly, especially as I think about my own creative process.
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"In class I do this drawing of this big mountain, that I call Hemingway Mountain. And talk about how, early in my writing life, I just wanted to be up there near the top. And then I realized: Shit, even if I made it to the top, I'd still be a Hemingway Imitator. So then you trudge back down—and look, there's Kerouac Mountain! Hooray. And then it's rinse, lather, and repeat—until the day comes when you've completely burned yourself out on that, and you see this little dung heap with your name on it, and go: Oh, all right, I'll take that—better to be minor and myself. So that is painful. Especially at first. But it's also spiritual, in a sense—it's honest, you know. It’s a good thing to say: Let's look at the world as it is, as opposed to the way I'd like it to be. Let's see how the world seems to me—as opposed to the way it seems to me, filtered through the voice of Hemingway (or Faulkner, or Toni Morrison, or Bukowski—whoever)." This whole interview is great, but as a creator, I liked thinking about this.
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I won't do Timo a disservice by quoting one fragment of this essay; it's one of those lovely pieces of writing where not a word is wasted, where it all builds an argument, and you should just read the whole thing. Lots of topics I've been touching on in recent years, in part because of my time at Berg, and the designers who are my friends and peers. This is what needs to be beaten into the world, a little; the way to beat it in is to build it in, through our work and products. I should work on that more.
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"I wanted to present a version of what The Aleph might look like now, designed as an endless stream of descriptive passages pulled from the web. For source texts, I took the complete Project Gutenberg as well as current tweets. I searched for the phrase "I saw.""
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"The problem of writing is always the problem of who you were, always the problem of who to be next. It is a game of catch-up, of understanding that what you’re failing to write could only be written by who you used to be. Who you are now should be writing something else: what, you won’t know until you try."
“Is there a canon for digital narratives / interactive stories / hypertext literature yet? A list of accepted classics and forms?”
What followed was a lot of us going “we don’t know”. And I wasn’t exactly helpful, by pointing out that those three things are (in some ways) completely different.
But. Nobody got anywhere but not being helpful, and to do so, I’m going to express (a bit) of an opinion, and hopefully something a little absolute. I hate list posts, but let’s put something down for people to argue about.
So, specifically: if I had to draw up a Canon – a canon of the interactive-story-thingies (we all know what they are – “things that the reader/audience interpret differently by interacting” is my best explanation) what would I include?
The rough goals were: not necessarily the best, but important pillars; no bias to high- or low- brow; trying to cover all media appropriately; interpret the question as broadly as you would like; don’t take too long over it. Here’s where I am:
- Cent mille milliards de poèmes, Raymond Queneau, 1961
- The Unfortunates, BS Johnson, 1969
- Zork, Infocom, 1980
- The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, Steve Jackson/Ian Livingstone, 1982
- Trinity, Infocom, 1985
- The Secret of Monkey Island, 1990
- 253, Geoff Ryman, 1996
- The Last Express, Jordan Mechner et al, 1997
- Spider and Web, Andrew Plotkin, 1998
- Planescape Torment, Black Isle, 1999
- Galatea, Emily Short, 2000
- The Beast, 2001
- Half-Life 2, Valve Software, 2004
- Gravitation, Jason Rohrer, 2008
- Dear Esther, thechineseroom, 2008/2012
- Fiasco, Jason Morningstar, 2009
- Sleep No More, Punchdrunk, 2011
- The Walking Dead, Telltale Games, 2012
- 30 Flights of Loving, Blendo Games, 2012
Things I wanted represented: pre-digital works; early, web-based hyperfiction; text-based IF, both classic and modern; things that are clearly videogames; an ARG (and the Beast still, in many ways, feels like the best); tabletop roleplaying; mechanical storytelling; a selection of Infocom writers (Moriarty, Meretzky).
I am not always picking things I like the most, nor things that are the “first” – so, for instance, Sleep No More probably is the most refined Punchdrunk work, and thus worth sharing here, but I’d swap it for one of their others easily.
What’s missing at the moment but shouldn’t be: the 1970s; more traditional hyperfiction (about which I don’t know enough); some big chronological gaps; boardgames/cardgames that touch on this (eg Once Upon A Time); anything pre-20th century; David Cage (I’m still not sure if I’d include him or not); no visual novels; no JRPGs (which are fascinating games, but there are few I’d include on this list); no Japanese adventure games (9/9/9 springs to mind, for instance).
There’s a bunch of thought that connects these; it’s not arbitrary, and like I said, not about favourites. Some things you might think to be obviously missing (especially: things from the world of videogames) are sometimes deliberate omissions (and sometimes accidental ones).
There’s definitely a particular thread I wanted to start stitching together, and these are the places I’d begin. Most items on this list are picked as representatives of categories; not as absolutes. This is definitely not the “n best interactive narratives list“.
Clearly a work in progress. But: if I had to teach this, or start writing some kind of giant thesis, I could do worse than begin here.
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"We were jealous of the younger kids in the one-to-one ward, because they had a PlayStation. It didn’t have the best games, but it had Micro Machines and Tomb Raider and it was better than what we had." I'd rather not quote anything other than the first line of this; you should just read it. A beautiful, haunting piece of writing from Mary Hamilton, about the things games can sometimes save us from (and sometimes can't). The kind of honesty you can't look away from, which is so hard to capture in writing, but which is here. Striking. (Trigger warning for self-harm).
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"When we complain about Shoreditch changing, about it being too expensive to stay here any longer, we are echoing the complaints and weary jokes of all the combat-trousered webmasters and the cocky conceptual artists and the serious synth-poppers and the upholsterers and tailors and printers and showmen who have been here before us."
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"We drove about for another hour or two after that, and by this point dad was hooked. Not hooked on L.A. Noire's narrative, perhaps, or caught up in the complex chains of missions, but hooked on the city, on the fascinating, insightful job that Rockstar had done in stitching the past together. Even though I can't actually drive, and the car we were in wasn't a real car anyway, I had a strong sense that I was in the front seat, turning the wheel beneath my hands, and he was riding low in the back, face pressed to the glass. Role reversal. It happens to all fathers and sons eventually, I guess. Why shouldn't it happen because of games?" Chris Donlan takes his Dad – who grew up in late-40s/early-50s LA – on a tour of LA Noire's Los Angeles, and what happens is a remarkable piece of virtual psychogeography. Perhaps my favourite piece of games writing this year.