1. The idea of interactivity in fiction isn’t a new idea, but it is one that still hasn’t been done well (as far as I’m concerned).
2. I never want to be like the people who write, program or enjoy text adventures.

While I’ve always liked the idea of adventure games, I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m not really the sort of person they’re aimed at. I’ve completed The Secret of Monkey Island, got a reasonable amount of the way through the Indiana Jones Adventures and a fair way through most of the Broken Sword games, but I don’t think I’ve ever got past the first room of a text adventure. Why is this? I think there are a couple of reasons.

The first is that my primary interest is making stories. I’m used to writing them and I enjoy being told them. What I don’t like doing is writing other people’s stories for them and that, for better or worse, is what text adventures feel like to me. I don’t want to work out what you think the right thing to say to the gatekeeper is. I either want to decide for myself or have it told for me. Text adventures feel too much like work, and not work that I enjoy.

The other reason is that I don’t like puzzles. Some people love being stumped. I’m not one of them. I don’t mind working things out, but I don’t enjoy the obtuse leaps of logic that are the main selling points of some of these games. I’ll freely admit that part of it’s laziness. I just can’t be bothered to devote the mental energies. Also, there’s the problem that games tend to be made by programmers. While I’m not disputing the writing quality of many text adventures, the inherent skills required for making such a thing depends on a logical understanding of locations, variables, logic, strings, integers and conditional loops. As a result, the thinking needed to progress tends to stem from this kind of thinking and it’s not something that I’m interested in, nor am I willing to relearn the skills needed to do so.

This is also why I’ve had so much trouble trying to make my own forays into interactive storytelling. Whether it’s games, branching stories, interactive fiction or even simple experiments with Javascript, there’s some part of my brain that just doesn’t grasp the fundamental aspects of programming. I read books and run through the courses and my brain says “yes, that makes sense, yes, I understand this” but when it comes to applying that knowledge to something I want to do, I just end up staring at the screen going “duh… I don’t know.” Which means I hate myself, because I know there are all sorts of interesting things that I’d like to try, but don’t have the grammar and syntax to make them happen. I’ve tried Processing. I’ve tried Javascript. I’ve tried Actionscript and Python. I’ve even tried Inform 7, the natural-language text adventure programming kit, and found it even more confusing than any other programming language I’ve ever tried. Somehow, it being closer to real text makes the fact that it doesn’t work even more annoying.

Truth be told, I’m a child of the GUI. Yes, I had an Amstrad CPC, but I didn’t program it. (I tried to learn by typing in the program listings from Amstrad Action, but would arbitrarily change variable names to ones I liked better. It was no surprise, therefore, that these programs never worked for me.) My only uses were playing games and writing stories. A few years later, I got an Amiga. Again, it was mainly games and stories, but I would also use coverdiscs to explore graphics, music and other things. This was all done with a mouse. The keyboard was for typing, triggering samples or quick-selecting tools in Deluxe Paint. When I inherited a friend’s 486 PC, it had Windows 95 on it. I never had to tangle with DOS. What I learned about HTML, I learned from Dreamweaver. What I learned about motion graphics, I learned from Flash. I’ve never been a hacker. I don’t even like games that involve hacking. I prefer kicking in the door and shooting everyone with a bazooka.

But I keep coming back to the idea of interactive stories, because I feel there’s something there that appeals to me. Having admitted to myself that a blank screen and a command prompt isn’t the way for me to start, I’ve been seeking out alternative ways of making these things – something with buttons that I can click. I use a brainstorming program called xMind quite extensively for story ideas and it occured to me that there should be something similar for mapping out branching narratives.

Twine is a cross-platform toolbox for creating interactive stories and is simple enough for someone like me to use. You have a start point and you add branches from there by adding boxes and linking them together. There’s some other stuff under the hood for setting conditions, but these are so simple that even I could get my head around them. In short, it’s the tool I’ve been looking for, at least in the short term. Rather than have to sit down and learn syntax and structure, you just write and string things together. I wasn’t really looking for sophistication, I just wanted something that I can use. Twine fit that bill perfectly. The overview lets you see how sections of the story (“Passages” in Twine’s parlance) interconnect. Links are created by enclosing options in [[double square brackets]] and the whole process is amazingly quick.

My first effort with Twine was a story called Breakdown. I’ll freely admit that it’s not amazing. The setting is a cliche in itself and the options presented aren’t particularly interesting. As it’s been created in the context of 52 Murders, virtually all options lead to a death, which would probably be hugely frustrating and unfair if it were a game, but that’s not the intent of the piece. The aim isn’t to win, but to explore the options laid out before you, hopefully in a manner that’s accessible as possible. The choices tend to be either/or and I don’t think there’s any backtracking or loops in the story (apart from one obvious one, which was a cheap ploy by me to excuse the fact that I didn’t know what else to do).

If nothing else, Twine made me feel as if I could just jump in and start writing, which tends to be the way I like to work, even if it’s just outlining the barebones and then going back and filling in the details. In this case, I laid out the choices and plot points as I went. This is probably the wrong approach to take, as I sometimes found myself painted into a corner, faced with logistical problems of how to link up various passages so that the overall plot made sense, no matter which way you went through it. I didn’t mind, though, because it was the sort of thing that I like to do. Making the pieces of the various plots work was my puzzle and one that I enjoyed working out. (This may mean that Breakdown was more fun to make than it was to play, but that doesn’t bother me too much. Experimentation is about failure as much as success.)As much as anything. I hope that Breakdown will have allowed me to get some of the more hoary cliches out of my system. It’s a really straightforward adventure-style story in the second person. I think I’d like to try some more interesting things with it.

The good thing is, I’m not afraid to try.

Addendum – Technical Problems

The main problems I had with Twine were technical. I couldn’t get it to install on my Windows XP netbook and the Mac OS version crashed a few times on me, usually at the point when I thought “I should probably save soon”. Hit “Save” after doing anything. Seriously. It’s not that bad, but the immutable law of crashes is that they’ll happen at the worst possible time.

Stories get exported as a single HTML file with embedded Javascript and CSS. I found I needed to tweak a couple of things in order to get the story working the way that I wanted. I used the “Jonah” template, which shows each passage in a continual sequence, rather than clearing the screen after every choice. In order to prevent the system getting confused, I had to change all story links from the usual format:

* [[Option A]]
* [[Option B]]

To this customised version, which blanks out the alternates when you choose one.

<<choice "Option A">>
<<choice "Option B">>

I thought I was being clever by laying out my story in the normal way, then exporting the source code into a text editor and replacing the square brackets with the pointy ones. I was not. When I reimported the source code, my carefully laid plans came out like this:

Which made tracing the story impossible. Luckily, it didn’t prove to be too much of a problem, as it was at the very end, but if it had been mid-way through a large project it could have been a real nightmare.

I also found that some of the under the hood programming I had done seemed to be messing up repeated read-throughs of the story. Stripping out the “Rewind to here” options was accomplished by changing the “visibility” tag of the “.passage .toolbar” CSS. This was done with a simple find-and-replace in TextEdit. I also changed the default “restart story” button in the HTML to a Javascript button that actually refreshed the page, using this:

<input type="button" value="Reload Page" onClick="window.location.reload()">

By actually refreshing the page, all the data and variables are cleared and the story restarts properly from scratch.

(I mention this stuff, just in case anyone else is having similar difficulties. The answers are probably on the Google Groups for Twee, but I always find discussion groups fairly impenetrable).

Undeterred, he set about proving the inferiority of women, declaring himself to be an unrepentant misogynist and seeking at every turn to denigrate the female gender. Although his constant invective made him a social pariah, he nevertheless managed to convince a naïve young woman to marry him. This, he thought, would be a chance to really prove his point about the superiority of men, which he did with a constant barrage of physical and mental abuse. Finally, when she could take it no more, his wife responded by stabbing him with a carving knife. The wound almost killed Wesley, but when the chain of events leading up to it was read out in court, the judge (a man) declared the assault as justifiable self-defence and ruled that Wesley should pay damages. Wesley was forced to conclude that men were not superior and another avenue of hate was closed off to him.

He remained undaunted, however, and set out to find a new group of people to hate. He tried anti-Semitism, but found he had a real taste for matzo ball soup and thought Woody Allen and Jackie Mason were hilarious. Similarly, his attempt to wage war on Islam came undone when he actually read the Qu’ran in order to ‘know his enemy’ and actually found it to be rather beautiful.

It was depressing. It seemed all people, no matter what shape or hue, had their merits. Wesley was starting to think that maybe he wasn’t cut out for the prejudice game after all. It was then that a bright idea struck him. Rather than concentrate on a section of humanity to despise (and then have to revoke his prejudice when it was proved false) he should concentrate his efforts on creatures that were by their very nature sub-human. He would turn his bigoted eye on the animal kingdom and prove that he was at the top of the food chain.

Well, not at the top, exactly. He couldn’t claim superiority over the creatures larger than him. He wasn’t about to pick a fight with a lion. Or a bear. Or an elephant, shark, alligator, rhino, gorilla, tiger or octopus. In fact, he didn’t feel comfortable having a go at any animal larger than him, so that ruled out horses, cows and even some large pigs. And, if he was honest, he didn’t like the idea of antagonising anything poisonous, so he decided not to pick on snakes, squids, frogs or lizards. He had no great love for dogs, but had to concede that they helped blind people and were useful for finding drugs in airports. Cats were small enough to be picked on, but were too aloof to take any notice of his ranting and as such made frustratingly unsatisfying victims. And he really couldn’t be bothered chasing mice, voles and hamsters around.

That left insects. Those bastard insects, coming into our homes and gardens, eating our sugar and buzzing on our windows. They would have to pay.

Pleased that he’d finally found an indisputably inferior victim, he set about taking his prejudicial actions to new extremes. Having rounded up a collection of maggots, he created a small concentration camp to house them in. This, he decided, was the perfect way to show them the error of their ways. Wesley’s position as prison warden only lasted a few weeks, however, after which the maggots turned to flies and buzzed away over his carefully modelled guard towers.

Non-winged insects, then. They were the real problem. They were the ones coming here and ruining everything for us decent, two-legged mammals. Reworking his concentration camp into a work-farm, Wesley installed a colony of ants – racially inferior ants – to work as his slaves. Occasionally, he would fry one or two with sunlight and a magnifying glass, but found this lacked the visceral impact he was after. After a short period of experimentation, he created a small gallows using a bonsai tree and fishing wire, which he used to hang the occasional ant as a warning to the others.

Truth be told, however, it wasn’t that satisfying. Asserting yourself superior to ants didn’t seem that much of an accomplishment. Besides, Wesley had to admit a sneaking admiration for the way the ants worked together. It was like they were all striving for some greater good. Like communists.

That gave him a shock. His dad had always told him that communists were evil – the puppeteers of blacks and jews. His dad had been a great racist – never questioned his beliefs or thought about what he was saying. Wesley had never really been able to live up to his dad’s standards of bigotry and now that the old man was dead, he would never know if his own discrimination would have pleased his father. Perhaps, then, the best he could do was try to live a good life and be happy.  Perhaps it wasn’t necessary to express hatred of a group of people just to honour the memory of one dead racist. Perhaps, Wesley thought, he should just try to be nice to people. It sounded like a good deal to him.

He took his concentration camp into the garden and let the ants run free. Staring out into the afternoon sun, he felt good about the world for the first time. So what if he turned out to be a communist, or a liberal or even a socialist? It wasn’t the worst thing that could happen.

It was at that moment that a bee stung Wesley. In and of itself, this would have been simply unfortunate (and slightly ironic given his reformed view of the world), but matters became decidedly worse when Wesley had an allergic reaction and went into anaphylactic shock. He was dead in seconds.

Freed from the mortal plain, Wesley’s spirit entered a state of awareness that the living can never experience. He was aware of the universe both as a whole and as each individual component and saw that each and every part was equally necessary. Every dimension became clear and Wesley’s consciousness was able to see how his life had touched those around him and how his actions had rippled out throughout the totality of space and time. Past, present and future were as one and formed the true holy trinity. Wesley’s consciousness reached out to his father and they stood together, finally able to see and share the breadth and beauty of all creation. In that moment, Wesley turned to his father and said that he got it now, that he could see that everything was connected and the idea was to harmonise and spread love throughout the universe.

His father turned to face him, his eyes shining with tears and in a wavering voice said:

“Fucking poof.”

which, reminded me of this video:

and this one:

And while it doesn’t seem like any of this is worth a post, I’ve really got to start doing more with this blogging thing. I’m still thinking of going back to tumblr.

Link: http://52murders.tumblr.com

Then the finger arrived.

It was wrapped in a note that made it clear that if the ransom wasn’t paid soon, more pieces would follow.

Her mother was distraught at the thought of her child being disfigured in such away.

Her father was furious at the gall of these low down criminals.

The police were ashamed at not taking the threat more seriously.

Only the private detective remained cool.

“Well, I don’t see there’s a problem,” he said, lighting a cigarette and pouring himself a drink. “Just keep them waiting and eventually… y’know…”

Everyone stared at the PI.

“What? You’ll get her back… and you won’t have to pay a cent!”

American Horror Story has been packed with so many cliches that it’s difficult to explain the programme’s appeal. Perhaps it’s the fact that it really is packed. Everything happens in such a short space of time that it becomes ludicrously entertaining. I’ve watched the first three episodes and already it feels like a whole series’ worth of events has taken place. It’s freebase horror, rather than the slow release opiates I usually prefer, but it’s so over the top that it’s difficult not to be drawn in.

Done a bit of the theatre this week by going to see The Queen of Spades at the Arcola. In the interests of full disclosure, I should state that this wasn’t the plan and that I had been intending to see Phaedra Wept by Sarah Kane, but that was sold out of pay-what-you-can tickets. So, there was this instead. Truth be told, I was kind of relieved not to see the Kane play, as it seemed pretty fucking miserable. Queen of Spades wasn’t miserable, exactly, but it didn’t really warm the cockles of the heart. An adaptation of a Pushkin short story, it’s a three hander told in rhyming couplets.  When my companion and I left the theatre our reactions were almost identical and can be distilled down to: “well, I’ve seen worse…”

Hip Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes, is a few years old, but the questions it raises about sexism, homophobia and violence in hiphop music are still very relevant. Unfortunately, my answer was to break out the old NWA albums and crank up the most offensive tunes I could find. Still, the documentary’s worth a look, if only for Busta Rhymes ducking the issue of homophobia in hip hop. It also reminded me of a unconfirmed rumour that flew around a while ago that Method Man and Redman, as well as being musical collaborators and bezzie mates, were in fact doing it on the sly. It should be pointed out that I don’t know if it’s true and that it also made My Mate The Rapper blanch at the thought, which is why it bears repeating.

Sunday turned into an unexpected Shatfest, when I found myself listening to this album (Spotify link) and reading Star Trek Memories, the introduction for which is so hyperbolic that it’s impossible to resist reading further.

Now I boldly go… into the bathroom, stumbling to the sink, where a sting of cold tile and a splash of cold water shock me at both extremities. The cobwebs finally begin to dissapate. I find my toothbrush, and in my hearly awakened state, I even manage to load it up. I now pause to admire my neatly symmetrical blob of tartar-control goo, lean in over the sink, look up into the mirror and come face-to-face with my own image, which scares me.

…My wrinkles, I muse, have been well earned, and they provide visual evidence of a career crammed with wonderful memories, and a life that’s been extraordinarily rewarding, both personally and professionally.

It’s not quite up there with Alan Partridge ending every anecdote with “needless to say, I had the last laugh”, but it’s a close second. And, to quote Shakin’ Stevens, it’s “lovely stuff”.

I’ve never read a Tom Clancy book before (although I’ve played the games that allow you to fight for America’s oil interests overseas) and on a whim, I picked up Dead or Alive from my local Sainsbury’s. It’s unclear whether it’s actually written by Clancy – he seems to have transformed himself into such a brand that he no longer actually has to write his novels – but it’s pretty much what I expected in that it’s slightly to the right of the Kaiser. Despite his inroads into videogames and his love of surveillance technology, I don’t know if Clancy’s embraced the web and social networking to its fullest. A shame, because his love of TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms) could make him the first novelist to truly make good use of Twitter. 140 character chunks could make his Republi-run-and-gun tomes shorter and punchier. Whole chapters could be digested to single tweets:

SAM KOs USAF F16. Pilot MIA in UAE. CIC OKs CIA LZ

Leaving Clancy and his cohorts to repeat USA-USA-USA for the remaining 500 pages.

“Blankets” by Craig Thompson was a little more contemplative. It’s one of the those long, deeply personal comics about awkward young men who can’t express their feelings. Ten years ago, I would have lapped it up. Nowadays, I don’t have quite so much patience and found myself skipping through it quite rapidly. It did make me think about how I read comics, however. So long as the art isn’t horrible, I really won’t notice it. The art isn’t horrible in “Blankets” – a lot of it is really quite lovely – but I found myself flipping quickly through even the most beautifully illustrated pages. I’m clearly an ignoramus.

The latest Nerdist Writers Panel featured Jon Enbom and Rob Thomas, who created two of my favourite series in the past few years – Party Down and Veronica Mars. Having been through both those series several times, I went back to Thomas’ first series, Cupid, which had two incarnations, one in the late 1990s and one in the mid 2000s. It’s a high concept idea – possibly crazy man thinks he’s the god of love and has to get 100 couples together in order to return to Mount Olympus. It’s easy to see why it appealed to network execs, but it never quite works and I found myself wishing for a composite version that pairs that bloke off Larry Sanders with that woman from Studio 60. But that doesn’t exist.

So I’ve been consoling myself with Living Room Songs, a lovely collection of chamber music pieces written performed by an Icelandic bloke in his living room. There are seven songs to download for free. It’s been helping me write when I don’t want to, which is more than I can say for a certain other Icelander, whose latest album isn’t doing that much for me. Anyway, the first one’s embedded below. If you like, visit the site and download the whole lot for nish.

Q: Does this mean quantum physics is a) wrong, b) stupid or c) proof that God exists, is watching all of us and forcing the universe to compress into a single choice which we all witness?

A: All three (probably simultaneously).