[Screenshots] Mafia 2

Vingt ans de rêves

J'ai commencé à noter mes rêves, aussi systématiquement que possible, en 1998, quand j'ai quitté ma famille pour aller étudier dans la "grande ville".

J'accordais déjà une certaine importance à la chose, depuis l'adolescence et même l'enfance ; sans doute comme tout le monde, j'avais gardé un souvenir très vif de rêves parfois extrêmement anciens, qui au même titre que certains souvenirs de la vie réputée réelle, avaient fini par intégrer mon paysage mental. Je me souviens aussi, au lycée, d'après-midi où je restais couché au lit, sur de la musique, essayant de trouver ce point précis de la somnolence où des images précises, réalistes, troublantes, naissent dans l'esprit, sans que l'on soit réellement endormi.

J'avais décidé, pendant les vacances, d'entamer un journal intime. La perspective de devenir étudiant, de me retrouver seul dans une grande ville, de changer presque entièrement d'entourage et de mode de vie, m'avait fait ressentir la nécessité d'entamer de nouvelles choses, d'aborder la vie d'une manière nouvelle et plus réfléchie – notamment de cette manière. Dès les premières semaines, j'avais commencé à noter des rêves, par-ci par-là. Leur caractère souvent dérangeant m'avait étonné mais aussi intrigué et quelque peu excité – intellectuellement mais aussi artistiquement.

Peu à peu, l'intérêt nouveau que j'avais trouvé à la chose m'a convaincu d'entamer un journal à part, entièrement dédié à ma vie nocturne. J'utilisais un cahier à spirale et à gros carreaux, dans lequel je me sentais obligé de faire des croquis, des plans, des portraits de choses et de personnes vues en rêve, comme s'il était nécessaire de transformer cette simple habitude en une démarche artistique ou mystique à la C.G Jung avec son fameux livre rouge.

Mais quel autre prétexte prendre, et comment se lancer dans ce genre d'entreprise sans en avoir un, ne serait-ce que "trouver des idées à exploiter de quelque manière que ce soit ensuite" ? Le seul argument gnothi seauton ne suffit pas ; noter ses rêves, et qui plus est pendant des années, est une entreprise en réalité hautement inutile au mieux, mentalement toxique plus vraisemblablement, spirituellement aussi d'ailleurs (Saint-Paul condamne ceux qui "donnent trop d'importance aux choses qu'ils voient en rêve") et socialement consternante car l'obsession que cela devient transparaît dans la vie quotidienne et les conversations ; combien de fois me suis-je retrouvé à raconter mes rêves de la nuit à des gens qui ne m'avaient rien demandé...

C'est un hobby addictif, également. Il m'est arrivé un certain nombre de fois de passer des après-midi à siester, dans l'espoir d'avoir quelque chose d'intéressant à noter à mon réveil ; j'ai quelques souvenirs comme ça, spécialement déprimants, d'après-midi obscures d'automne, de réveils pâteux et désagréables à la tombée de la nuit. Mais l'addiction est bien là, et d'autant plus forte qu'il est fréquent, lorsque l'on couche sur le papier un rêve que l'on vient de faire, de se retrouver submergé d'autres rêves, jusque là oubliés, et dont on a l'impression qu'on ne dispose que de quelques secondes pour les noter avant qu'ils disparaissent à nouveau, pour toujours ou non – et l'on se demande, dans ces moments-là, dans quelle zone du cerveau ces rêves sont stockés, et quel poids insoupçonné ils ont sur notre psyché, dans l'hypothèse où réellement l'esprit ne les oublie jamais vraiment.

Écrire à la main dans un bon vieux cahier a toujours eu, et a encore pour moi, même si je ne le pratique plus beaucoup, un aspect très attirant, pour le côté forcément unique, et très personnel de l'objet que l'on se crée peu à peu. Mais comme tout le monde, par soucis d'efficacité et de gain de temps, j'ai fini par passer au PC. C'est alors que j'ai noté mes rêves non pas dans le bloc-note ou sur un quelconque document personnel, mais sur un blog public, que j'ai d'emblée voulu collectif. Avec mon amie de l'époque et quelques amis, j'ai donc ouvert Le Sonde-Ténèbres puis plus tard, avec un effectif plus réduit, l'incroyablement originalement nommé Journal des Rêves.

J'ai continué, bon an mal an, au fil du temps, jusqu'à aujourd'hui – ou pour être précis, jusqu'à fin 2018, considérant que vingt ans étaient suffisants, qu'ils fallait passer à autre chose, accorder moins d'attention à cette partie de ma vie – et tant pis pour gnothi seauton.

Ceci étant, mes récits de rêves m'ont servi à tout : idées de scénarios pour des nouvelles, pour des F.I, pour de la musique, pour apporter certains changements à ma vie réelle et diurne... Le résultat n'a jamais été très satisfaisant, pour être honnête, à tel point que j'ai à peu près arrêté d'essayer d'en faire quelque chose – sans pouvoir arrêter de les noter pour autant. L'intérêt réel de la démarche m'a toujours échappé et m'échappe encore, je sens qu'il existe, qu'il est formulable, je l'ai sur le bout des lèvres et pourtant...

Caught in Flux

A few weeks ago I got back the Amstrad CPC 6128 that I had left at a distant (in every sense of the word) ex-girlfriend's place in Meuse.

My floppy disk collection went with it, and I found a program that I remembered existed, but not really what it contained or what it looked like technically speaking: a draft of an interactive fiction, which I don't know why, I remembered very vaguely, but thought I had written it as a child. But I didn't get my CPC until 1991, when I was 11.

Anticipating at the time that I would be senile before my fortieth birthday, I indicated at the beginning of the program its creation date: 1995. So I was already living in the house where my parents, my sister and I moved in 1993, while in false memories, which I held to be absolutely true, I saw myself typing this code in our very first apartment. Also according to the information in comments at the beginning of the code, my old friend Xavier participated. At first I wondered why, but then I realized that he was the one who provided me with the initial code template from which I could start my little game. Without him, nothing would have been possible.

The game – which is called Les Masques du Carnaval – has a few rooms, namely the rooms of a house that you are supposed to get out of by solving a minimalist puzzle. There are corpses, masks, a clown and an acrobat (?) to whom you can talk but who are hallucinations. I wouldn't go so far as to say that this is the matrix of Azthath, but between La Ville, this thing, and Azthath, let's say that there is a continuity of obsessions.

I will try to debug this game and include it in my official bibliography. After all...

Parenthesis about L'Observatoire

I've been working a lot, a lot on L'Observatoire these last few weeks, and I realize that I have to take regular breaks, like when you have to come back to the surface after a breath-holding dive, because the content of this game is so toxic and painful to me. I can't wait to finish it and move on, for good.

A friend of mine answered me, some time ago, when I asked her if she wrote down her dreams (since she had just told me the one of the previous night): "No, and I don't keep my dirty Kleenex". It was a bit bluntly formulated but undeniably right; you don't keep your dirty Kleenex, and if you do, you don't eat them as a bonus, hoping to find yourself well nourished, able to produce something good. And yet that's what I do. It's my daily bread.

I think I'm going to take a big, big break from I.F – at least the ones related to Azthath – when I finish this game. Just to detox a little bit and rest, because I'm really tired, mentally tired, lately, and I need to do nothing, or something healthy and down to earth.

*

That said, L'Observatoire is growing, inexorably. I calculated 21,000 words for a walkthrough (and the other possible choices should yield a fairly similar result), which is three times the amount of text in the original game, released for Comp 2016.

I'm trying to enrich the story, the "amount" of background and memories for the player-character to go through before entering the Observatory itself, but also – annoyed and a bit offended by some comments like "I feel like I'm clicking through a book and not playing" – to improve and enrich the actions proposed to the (player-character), as it's true that even for a game based on memories and the past, the player himself has to be given something to do other than reading.

I've almost finished the first part of the game, the one before the final dialogue with Paloma and Hartmann, which I intend to extend and enrich as well. So in the end, it will be a "big" game. As big as possible, because I have no idea when another chapter of Azthath will be released. A few years?

However, I'm not making it an RPG with two thousand quests, as many NPCs, and a map the size of a country. L'Observatoire remains an intimate game, covering a short period of time (one evening) in the lives of its characters.

The more I progress, the more it seems to me that a certain unity of time and place is desirable in an I.F – one can always fantasize about a game that would make us travel through hundreds or thousands of rooms that would be as many wilderness areas, villages, cities, countries, where we would meet more NPCs than we can handle. ... and I still have this fantasy from time to time (if only for Azthath itself, the city), but I realized that it is with a formula like the one of L'Observatoire that I work best, and that I have the best chances to finish what I start.

Hence the subdivision of Azthath into chapters, and then into small independent games – I'll probably end up publishing one sentence after another, or object by object...

Existential self-cannibalism

It was L'Observatoire, with its zone – corresponding, except for a few details, to a neighborhood of my youth – that gave me the idea of doing the same experiment with multiple real-life places: isolating small portions of them and making them, almost as they are, zones for I.F or fiction. I keep them in my notes, in case they can be used one day.

What struck me each time I identified an exploitable zone (because not all places are exploitable, but I couldn't say precisely what makes a "zone" one) is the fact that I would have been unable to imagine it myself, as it is, with all its elements, banal or exceptional.

It is their coexistence, their juxtaposition that makes the salt of the "zone". The real world is always more imaginative than a writer's or a coder's brain – just as the history of the real world is always more exciting and improbable in its richness and beauty than any fictional fantasy world; and as such, I am increasingly detaching myself from anything in Azthath that was too heavily "fictional world imagined in its minutest details and desperately trying to be original" – and failing to do so.

*

Beyond these well-defined, identified areas, which I am accumulating endlessly, I have undertaken an even more exhaustive list of all the places I know that could be of interest as settings for fiction.

I do the same with all the people I have met in my life. Because I couldn't possibly imagine characters as complex, moving or crazy as the people in the real world. There are usually only ultra-minor, cosmetic changes that need to be made in order to project them into a story.

"Write about what you know," as aspiring writers are told... And finally it's true, true in a frighteningly concrete way. There is nothing that works better than to pick directly from the heads we see in our daily lives, from the places we frequent, from the stories we hear, barely transposing them, so little, in fact, into fictions.

Cannibalize the real. Be an absolute capitalist with your own life: make everything profitable. Be your own pimp.

Phantom parcels

The last "zone" that came to my mind was a neighborhood in Saint-Mihiel, in the Meuse. I lived there for a few years, together with a girl who lived there, and who is the same girl from whom I recently got my CPC. I started working on Azthath at her house in 2008 or 2009.

When I went back there a few weeks ago, nothing had changed in the streets or in the big old house (from the 18th century) where she lived at the time and on the first floor of which her parents' store is still located. Nothing but a vague embarrassment, and a baby in the living room, who even before knowing how to speak, was telling me that I had nothing more to do there, that I had to take my things and get out as soon as possible. Which I did without asking for help.

*

I think about Saint-Mihiel from time to time, to certain streets where we used to walk, certain routes in particular. I see scenes, memories in the form of scenes, probably untrue, because any account of one's life, to others or to oneself, is a lie, a fiction – which makes it perhaps a little less serious to prostitute one's memories and one's whole life in the form of stories for the public.

I was intensely, unimaginably unhappy in that city, and yet I remember it today with a strange pleasure, a strange attraction, and I can only explain it by telling myself that all of this – the setting, the moods, the images that come back to me – make a pretty good framework for fiction.

I wanted to see again the rue Jeanne d'Arc, this street near the Meuse, narrow and made of rather high and seemingly uninhabited buildings – one of them was really uninhabited and fascinated me – where we used to walk the dog regularly, at dusk. I wanted to see it again by going on Google Street View, which is gradually becoming my interface with the real world, as there are so many places where I don't want to go anymore, or can't go anymore – and having the sublime advantage, often, of not being updated, which allows me to visit the said places as they were and are not anymore.

But the street was not available on Street View. It was part of the inaccessible areas of the Net, as there were in Second Life, about which I wrote because they fascinated me.

"Dead parcels. Or ghost parcels. There are areas in Second Life that you can't enter. You can see what's there – vegetation, houses, roads, sometimes whole neighborhoods – since there are no borders, no walls; but you can't enter. You're walking, you're flying, you're going straight to a strange and lonely house in the middle of a plain, and suddenly an invisible wall stops you; a pop-up informs you that the plot has been banished and that it is impossible to enter.

Is there a way to get in anyway? And if so, how is it, once inside?

The memories of a life are also strewn with banished parcels, dead parcels, ghost parcels. The streets I never walked down. The houses I never entered, and where I will never enter, which were for me only elements of scenery, a trompe-l'oeil of a theater stage - and yet real, for others, but of a reality to which I will definitely never have access. The dead parcels of my inner space. And how many houses I have actually entered, in the past, how many people I have known, how many thoughts I have had, that today I can only see from the outside, knowing that they existed, that they were experienced from the inside, but where I can no longer enter? Dead parcels of my own memory."

The dead parts of my own memory are numerous, decidedly, I realized it while browsing the whole city on Street View afterwards. How many streets, houses, gardens, semi-ruins, architectural details have turned my stomach, under the blow of an emotion that is not even linked to what I could have lived there at the time I was actually going there, but to the mere fact of recovering the memory.

*

The friend who introduced me to interactive fiction is named Eric and I knew him because he had a group called Anamnèse. Anamnesis: opposite of amnesia. Recollection.

*

Every street is a mystery: what is behind the facades, the doors, the windows? I often ask myself this question while walking around, especially in the streets I know best, where I grew up, and where I sometimes realize that I have never been inside their buildings, that I have no idea what the homes and the people who occupy them look like, nor their backyards, their gardens, their cellars.

In 2006 I worked at the local supermarket in my hometown as an appliance deliveryman. This was an opportunity to enter an unexpected number of houses that I had always known from the outside, and to finally get to know their interior configuration, their decoration, their atmosphere. Entering such places was both to discover a little more of the real, and to penetrate the aesthetic, emotional, moral, etc. worlds of the people who lived or had lived there. I remember an old bourgeois building, downtown, which seemed to have crossed the twentieth century without moving a hair. I also remembered a low-income building where I had never dared to set foot, and where this time a little girl with the hoarse voice of a mysterious old smoker had guided me to my client, through deserted corridors, with walls riddled with holes, and even in some places with enough holes for a man to pass through; it was like a video game.

*

It also reminded me of some of the dreams of my youth, where I explored stairwells that went on forever, or sometimes opened onto other streets, buildings containing streets and other buildings – a city within a city, interlocking worlds, and secrets. Something of this remains in Azthath, where one can get lost in seemingly endless corridors, where dwellings, shops, abandoned areas, occult temples, squats, thugs' hideouts, can follow each other in a totally incoherent way in an urban labyrinth, interior and invisible from the street.

Each memory is also a street, full of obscure windows, doors that could have been opened but to which we will never know what they lead – or even, that we did open, once upon a time, but that what they led to has been erased from our memory.

We might as well make a fiction out of it, consciously.

*

When I drew up a list of places in the Saint-Mihiel district that I wanted to use for fiction – a bistro, a gun shop, an abandoned building, an old covered market – it appeared to me that they could all have a real role in a fiction, but above all they all had, once they were put in relation to each other, a weight, an even greater novelistic charge – implicit, undetermined for the moment, but clearly detectable, guessable. No need to invent painfully: reality provides all that is needed.

Artificiality cherished

I took a walk a while ago, just before dawn, on a path along the Saar River, near my home. It runs along fields, buildings, a retirement home, a soccer stadium. A footbridge leads to the supermarket parking lot; just after, still on the water's edge and already on the parking lot, there is a strange, unexpected place, where there are picnic tables, reeds, street lamps.

This mixture of concrete and nature, this juxtaposition of places with totally different functions, gives the place a totally incongruous and artificial side. It's something I've loved for a long time, for reasons that partly escape me. But I have always felt particularly comfortable in zoos, amusement parks, vacation villages, shopping areas and the most artificial residential areas, all places that I feel are fake, ahistorical and whose very design prevents any sociability and any "normal" life. Places where to live a peaceful, restful alienation.

*

This artificial, unreal atmosphere, and the streetlights at the water's edge, while darkness was still almost total, made me think about a reflection I had already made: they gave the impression of being, in a video game, discrete spatial markers, intended to guide the player, without him even realizing it, towards the right destination.

This is not the first time I feel this strange impression of being "in a video game". This is what I wrote in November 2009, when I used to walk around the city at night.

"Illuminated houses: fantasies of unlived lives, the syndrome of the lost traveler and "what could happen if I knocked", stories and characters that emerge from the smallest detail seen through the window. More than the house that we spy and the interior that we try to see, it is always our own house; we are voyeurs of ourselves, we want to discover ourselves. Images of decrepitude, of death. Solitude of the walker.

Cité Malleray. The feeling of being in a video game. The video game as a mode of existence and experience of reality and novelty. Exploration. Trip, waking dream. Nothing is real. Loneliness once again.

In front of a beautiful house: I place myself in relation to the streetlight and the branches of the trees above me, to have the most beautiful light and the most beautiful framing. I realize that I don't see reality, I see my fantasies, and I don't approach reality as a reality, but as an aesthetic material, a work of art that would only ask to be fixed, by pressing a button.

I went up to the cemetery; I did not know the place at all, I discover the geography of the city in real time. Impression again to be in a video game. The solitude allowing almost any action. The full moon, enormous, yellow, Lovecraftian. Subtle change of atmosphere, from one step to the next, like several times during each walk; because each street corner, each architectural nuance, each subtle change of lighting takes to other inner worlds."

These psychogeographical strolls coincided with my return to video games, my discovery of interactive fiction, and, overall, my unhappiness with Laurence – not because of her, but with her – from whom everything was good for mental escape.

To the slaughterhouse

Beyond the private unhapiness, it is undoubtedly the decrepitude of Saint-Mihiel and the atmosphere, on the one hand extremely natural, wild, and on the other hand heavily historical of the surrounding region, incredibly depressing and anxiety-provoking, which aroused in me this need for the artificial and even the virtual.

It is a region of immense forests, orchards and tiny villages. One feels far away from everything, in a world of hunting and miserable agriculture, in an indefinite past, a kind of "old France" eternity marked forever by the First World War. There are still German and French trenches, intact, walkable, a few hundred meters from the houses, and where the tourists – concentrated in Verdun, 30 minutes away – do not come. There is not an acre of land that is not a cemetery.

My parents-in-law at the time had a large garden and orchards below Les Éparges, the peak that had been completely reshaped by the bombs. There were thousands of dead per square meter. My father-in-law could not turn over the slightest clod of earth without bringing out shrapnel, bones, and remains of all kinds (I kept a certain number of them at home for a few years before throwing them away to purify the mental atmosphere in which I lived). A little further on, in some forests, the earth was still poisoned. Nothing could be done with it for decades, maybe centuries.

*

There was (and still is) a chicken farm, near St Mihiel. Just after the town, in the middle of the forest. How do you say? "Born, raised and slaughtered in France". This minimal biography would have been more than adequate for the hundreds of thousands of soldiers who came to be killed in the vicinity, advancing quietly, in line, towards the industrialized massacre. Just as one lines up to take the subway.

*

As I've been thinking about this lately, I've realized that being French has always been, for me, being caught up in a flow and a collective belonging, without me really asking myself about the content: being French was, in my childhood and teenage imagination, going to school, taking the subway, stopping at a truck stop when I went on vacation with my parents, in the midst of other French people, from the four corners of the country, of whom I had only a vague idea.

It was a series of collective experiences, perfectly framed, where I had no need to be an individual and no questions to ask myself. It was an abstract and mostly infrastructure-driven vision. But as a Frenchman from the margins, from a region that has always oscillated between two countries, two languages, two destinies, it was all that was available to me.

Something of this conception remains in my love of commercial zones and all artificial places where the total codification of behavior, where maximum enrolment dispenses with any individual life, any risk of separation from others – since they also forbid any real rapprochement.

*

I started working on Inform 7 with this girl, with the help of Eric who typed the first draft of the Azthath code, to show me how it worked, while I was initially going to write an CYOA (of which there is still a draft online with paragraphs that I will have to recycle one day).

Azthath, like the video games or Second Life, was from the beginning a way to escape, in the imagination, the heaviness and the depression of this French environment, riddled with history, as one is riddled with bullets.

A fantasy of a world out of time and a melting pot of multiple styles and cultural influences, a sort of double of Nancy, mixed with Paris, Cuba, Prague, who knows what else...

But the theme of war, of destruction, of massacre, of the whole society being regimented, brutalized and deformed – culturally, morally, politically – for decades by the experience of war, quickly invited itself, infiltrated in Azthath, until it became obsessive and overshadowed everything else.

"It's French, madam, it's french I.F"

I've been fantasizing for two or three years about writing an I.F whose settings, social context, etc., would be inspired in part by Saint-Mihiel (and a few other equally decrepit little towns in the region, like Blâmont or Fénétrange).

What appeals to me most in the idea is the 100% French context, absolutely nothing but French, in which the story would be set. Not out of misplaced patriotism, but because French fiction is rarely inspired by the reality, past or present, of France – except for the Parisian theme, and even then, it is less a reality than a series of marketing clichés intended to attract tourists who will soon fall victim to the syndrome that strikes so many Japanese.

French fiction, therefore, is far too much inspired by the international, Anglo-Saxon model, and I myself sacrificed it by working on locations in my region, such as sawmills, lakes, foggy forests, roadside bars... to be reused in stories, and by saying to myself "Great, it's like Twin Peaks". As if it was necessary to pass the French reality through an American filter to make it valuable.

It became a subject of reflection for me since a discussion with Monsieur Bouc, when Hugo Labrande's game, Le Kebab hanté, was released. He told me that it was admirable because you would never see it in an Anglo-Saxon game; the kebab is a Franco-French reality, almost exclusively. This is of course very debatable (we eat as many kebabs in Germany, and probably everywhere in Europe, as in France) but this idea of cultural and daily realities, really specific, inimitable, and ignored until now by fiction, interactive or not, has marked me.

Figre Tibre talks about this in a recent video where he talks about his game Antioch, whose characters are "very French" policemen, who talk, eat and take their time, and are neither CSI in Miami nor Sherlock Holmes.

Conclusion(s)

I remember that my girlfriend at the time had recurring dreams of floods, of rising waters. It became for me the symbol of a catastrophe as much psychic as concrete, collective, and I kept it in a corner of my head, for a fiction, interactive or not, "one day". This image obsessed me too. And all the more so as it resonated with the cover of a record I was particularly listening to at the time, and whose title alone, Caught in Flux, upset me, in the same difficult-to-explain way as the Talking Heads' song (and video), Road to Nowhere. To be caught in the flow of days, in the flow of one's consciousness, in the flow of historical events, of life quite simply, without ever being able to get out of it, or even slow down. And this flood that destroys everything at the same time as it is a relief, when the pressure has become unbearable.

This LP was given to me by a certain Laura, in Nancy, in 2002.

She continues her little life with me, under the name of Paloma, in L'Observatoire. But basically, even if we still talk to each other, we don't have much to say to each other anymore, and it would be reasonable, one day, to cut the cord for good. Just as it would be good to cut the cord with Laurence, whose baby on the couch, even if it didn't speak yet, was telling me nothing but "You don't belong here anymore".

*

For the first time, during my last walk in Nancy a few weeks ago, I passed by a gate in an alley in the old town, which leads to a courtyard of a building, at the end of a corridor, and that had always fascinated me – like all the "secret" passages and everything that hints at streets, neighborhoods, hidden, private, necessarily mysterious worlds, cities within the city, like the ones I saw in the dreams of my youth that I recounted above, and that are found in Azthath.

Well, there, for the first time, it was open and I was able to enter, and of course there was nothing to see except a courtyard. I look back on it now with a strange relief, and a bit of sad amusement, because it's a perfectly acceptable end point for a story – a twenty-year story. It's as if in a merciful move Nancy said to me, "See? A yard is a yard. Buildings are buildings."

It's as if the city was saying, "See, I have no mystery to hide from you. Let it go. You don't belong here anymore."

Pris dans le flux

Il y a quelques semaines j'ai récupéré l'Amstrad CPC 6128 que j'avais laissé chez une lointaine (dans tous les sens du terme) ex-compagne, en Meuse.

Ma collection de disquettes allait avec, et j'y ai retrouvé un programme dont je me souvenais de l'existence, mais pas vraiment ce qu'il contenait ni à quoi il ressemblait techniquement parlant : une ébauche de fiction interactive, dont je ne sais pourquoi, je me souvenais très vaguement, mais en pensant l'avoir écrite enfant. Or je n'ai eu mon CPC qu'en 1991, à l'entrée du collège, donc.

Prévoyant à l'époque que je serais gâteux avant mes quarante ans, j'ai indiqué au début du programme sa date de création : 1995. Je vivais donc déjà dans la maison où mes parents, ma sœur et moi avons emménagé en 1993, alors que dans de faux souvenirs, que je tenais pour absolument vrais, je me voyais taper ce code dans notre tout premier appartement. Toujours selon les informations indiquées dans des commentaires en début de code, mon vieil ami Xavier a participé. Je me suis d'abord demandé en quoi, avant de réaliser que c'est tout simplement lui qui m'avait fourni le modèle initial de code à partir duquel j'ai pu commencer mon petit jeu. Sans lui, rien n'aurait donc été possible.

Le jeu – qui s'intitule on ne sait trop pourquoi Les Masques du Carnaval – comporte quelques rooms, à savoir les pièces d'une maison dont on est censé sortir en résolvant un puzzle minimaliste. Il y a des cadavres, des masques, un clown et un saltimbanque (?) à qui on peut parler mais qui sont des hallucinations. Je n'irais pas jusqu'à dire que c'est la matrice d'Azthath, mais entre La Ville, cette chose-là, et Azthath, disons qu'il y a une continuité d'obsessions.

Je vais essayer de débuguer ce jeu et l'inclure à ma bibliographie officielle. Après tout...

Parenthèse au sujet de l'Observatoire

J'ai beaucoup, beaucoup travaillé sur L'Observatoire ces dernières semaines, et je m'aperçois que je dois régulièrement faire des pauses, comme quand on doit remonter à la surface après une plongée en apnée, tant le contenu de ce jeu m'est toxique et pénible. J'ai hâte de l'avoir terminé et de passer, pour de bon, à autre chose.

Une amie m'a répondu il y a quelques temps, par SMS, quand je lui demandais si comme moi elle notait ses rêves (puisqu'elle venait de me raconter celui de la nuit précédente) : "Non, et je ne conserve pas mes kleenex sales". C'était formulé de manière un peu brutale mais indéniablement juste ; on ne conserve pas ses kleenex sales, et si on le fait, on ne les mange pas en prime, et en espérant s'en trouver bien nourri, apte à produire quelque chose de bon. Et pourtant c'est ce que je fais. C'est mon pain quotidien.

Je pense que je ferai une grosse, grosse pause en matière d'I.F – en tous cas, celles liées à Azthath, quand j'aurai fini ce jeu-ci. Histoire de me désintoxiquer un peu et de me reposer, car je suis vraiment fatigué, mentalement fatigué, ces derniers temps, et ai besoin de ne rien faire, ou alors des occupations saines et terre à terre.

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Ceci étant, L'Observatoire grandit, donc, inexorablement. J'ai calculé 21 000 mots pour un walkthrough (et les autres choix possibles doivent donner un résultat assez similaire), ce qui représente trois fois la quantité de texte du jeu initial, sorti pour la Comp 2016.

J'essaie d'enrichir l'histoire, la "quantité" de background et de souvenirs à ressasser pour le personnage-joueur avant d'entrer à l'Observatoire même, mais aussi – ennuyé et un peu vexé par certains commentaires du type "J'ai l'impression de cliquer à travers un livre et non pas de jouer" – d'améliorer et enrichir les actions proposées au (personnage-)joueur, tant il est vrai que même pour un jeu basé sur les souvenirs et le passé, il faut bien donner au joueur lui-même quelque chose à faire d'autre que lire.

J'ai quasiment fini la première partie du jeu, celle avant le dialogue final avec Paloma et Hartmann, que je compte bien rallonger et enrichir aussi. Au final, ce sera donc un "gros" jeu. Aussi gros que possible, car je ne sais pas du tout à quelle échéance sortira un autre chapitre d'Azthath. Quelques années ?

Pour autant, je n'en fais pas un RPG avec deux mille quêtes, autant de PNJ, et une map à l'échelle d'un pays. L'Observatoire reste un jeu intimiste, couvrant une courte période de temps (une soirée) dans la vie de ses personnages.

Plus j'avance, plus il me semble qu'une certaine unité de temps et de lieu est souhaitable dans une I.F – on peut toujours fantasmer sur un jeu qui nous ferait voyager à travers des centaines ou des milliers de rooms qui seraient autant d'étendues sauvages, de villages, de villes, de pays, où l'on croiserait plus de PNJ que l'on ne peut en aborder... et moi-même j'ai encore de temps à autres ce fantasme (ne serait-ce que pour Azthath même, la ville), mais je me suis malgré tout rendu compte que c'est avec une formule comme celle de L'Observatoire que je travaille le mieux, et que j'ai le plus de chances d'achever ce que je commence.

D'où la subdivision d'Azthath en chapitres, puis en petit jeux indépendants – je finirai sans doute par publier une phrase après l'autre, ou objet par objet...

Auto-cannibalisme existentiel

C'est L'Observatoire, avec sa zone – correspondant, à quelques détails près, à un quartier de ma jeunesse – qui m'a donné l'idée de faire la même expérience avec de multiples lieux de la vie réelle : en isoler de petites portions et en faire, quasiment telles quelles, des zones pour des F.I ou de la fiction. Je les garde dans mes notes, au cas où elles puissent servir un jour.

Ce qui m'a frappé à chaque fois que j'ai identifié une zone exploitable (car tous les lieux ne le sont pas, mais je ne saurais pas dire précisément ce qui fait qu'une "zone" en est une) est le fait que j'aurais été incapable de l'imaginer moi-même, telle qu'elle est, avec tous ses éléments, banals ou exceptionnels.

C'est leur coexistence, leur juxtaposition qui fait le sel de la  "zone". Le réel est toujours plus imaginatif qu'un cerveau d'écrivain ou de codeur – de même que l'Histoire du monde réel est toujours plus excitante et invraisemblable de richesse et de beauté, que n'importe quel monde fictif de fantasy ; et à ce titre, je me détache de plus en plus de tout ce qui dans Azthath avait un côté trop lourdement "monde fictif imaginé dans ses moindres détails et essayant désespérément d'être original" – et qui y échouait, en prime.

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Au-delà de ces zones bien délimitées, identifiées, que j'accumule sans fin, j'ai entrepris une liste encore plus exhaustive de tous les lieux que je connais et qui peuvent présenter un intérêt en tant que décors de fiction.

Je fais la même chose avec tous les gens que j'ai pu croiser dans ma vie. Parce que je serais incapable d'imaginer des personnages aussi complexes, émouvants ou cinglés que les gens qui peuplent le monde réel. Il n'y a généralement que des modifications ultra-mineures, cosmétiques, à faire pour pouvoir les projeter dans un récit.

"Écrivez sur ce que vous connaissez", comme on dit aux aspirants écrivains... Et finalement c'est vrai, vrai d'une manière effroyablement concrète. Il n'y a rien qui marche mieux que de piocher directement dans les têtes qu'on voit dans sa vie quotidienne, dans les lieux qu'on fréquente, dans les histoires qu'on entendu, en les transposant à peine, si peu, en réalité, dans des fictions.

Cannibaliser le réel. Être un capitaliste absolu avec sa propre vie : tout rentabiliser. Être son propre maquereau.

Parcelles fantômes

La dernière "zone" en date qui m'est apparue est un quartier de Saint-Mihiel, dans la Meuse. Je l'ai fréquentée quelques années, en même temps qu'une fille qui y vivait, et qui est justement celle chez chez qui j'ai récupéré mon CPC récemment. C'est chez elle également que j'ai commencé à travailler sur Azthath vers 2008 ou 2009.

Quand j'y suis retourné il y a quelques semaines, rien n'avait changé dans les rues ni dans la grande et vieille maison (du XVIIIème siècle) où elle vivait à l'époque et au rez-de-chaussée de laquelle est toujours installé le magasin de ses parents. Rien à part une vague gêne, et un bébé dans le salon, qui avant même de savoir parler, me disait que je n'avais plus rien à faire là, qu'il me fallait prendre mes affaires et dégager au plus vite. Ce que j'ai fait sans demander mon reste.

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Je repense à Saint-Mihiel de temps à autres, à certaines rues où nous nous promenions, certains trajets en particulier. Je revois des scènes, des souvenirs sous forme de scènes, probablement mensongères, car tout récit de vie, aux autres ou à soi-même, est un mensonge, une fiction – ce qui rend peut-être un peu moins grave le fait de prostituer ses souvenirs et toute sa vie sous forme d'histoires à destination du public.

J'ai été intensément, inimaginablement malheureux dans cette ville, et pourtant je m'en souviens aujourd'hui avec un étrange plaisir, une bizarre attirance, et je ne peux l'expliquer, justement, qu'en me disant que tout cela – le décor, les ambiances, les images qui me reviennent – forment un plutôt bon cadre de fiction.

J'ai voulu revoir la rue Jeanne d'Arc, cette rue proche de la Meuse, étroite et faite d'immeubles assez hauts et semblant inhabités – l'un d'eux l'était réellement et me fascinait – où nous promenions régulièrement le chien, au soir tombant. J'ai voulu la revoir en allant sur Google Street View, qui devient peu à peu mon interface avec le monde réel, tant il y a de lieux où je veux plus, ou peux plus aller – et présentant le sublime avantage, souvent, de ne pas être mis à jour, ce qui me permet de visiter les-dits lieux tels qu'ils étaient et ne sont plus.

Mais la rue n'était pas disponible sur Street view. Elle faisait partie des zones inaccessibles du Net, comme il y en avait dans Second Life, au sujet desquelles j'ai écrit car elles me fascinaient.

"Les parcelles mortes. Ou parcelles fantômes. Il y a  des zones dans Second Life dans lesquelles on ne peut pas entrer. On peut voir ce qui s’y trouve – végétation, maisons, routes, parfois des quartiers entiers – il n’y a pas de frontière, pas de mur ; mais on ne peut pas y entrer. On marche, on vole, on file droit vers une maison étrange et solitaire, au milieu d’une plaine, et soudain, un mur invisible nous arrête ; une fenêtre d’alerte s’ouvre et nous informe que la parcelle a été bannie et qu’il est impossible d’y entrer.

Y-a-t-il un moyen d’y entrer malgré tout ? Et si oui, comment est-ce, une fois à l’intérieur ?

Les souvenirs d’une vie sont parsemés eux aussi de parcelles bannies, parcelles mortes, parcelles fantômes. Les rues que je n’ai jamais empruntées. Les maisons où je ne suis jamais entré, et où je n’entrerai jamais, qui n’ont jamais été pour moi que des éléments de décor, un trompe-l’œil de scène de théâtre – et pourtant réelles, pour d’autres, mais d’une réalité à laquelle je n’aurai définitivement jamais accès. Les parcelles mortes de mon espace intérieur. Et combien de maisons où je suis effectivement entré, dans le passé, combien de gens que j’ai connus, combien de pensées que j’ai eues, qu’aujourd’hui je ne vois plus que de l’extérieur, sachant qu’ils ont existé, qu’ils ont été vécus de l’intérieur, mais où je ne peux plus entrer ? Parcelles mortes de ma propre mémoire."

Les parcelles mortes de ma propre mémoire sont nombreuses, décidément, je m'en suis rendu compte en parcourant toute la ville sur Street View ensuite. Combien de rues, de maisons, de jardins, de semi-ruines, de détails architecturaux m'ont retourné le ventre, sous le coup d'une émotion qui n'est même pas liée à ce que j'ai pu vivre là-bas à l'époque où j'y allais réellement, mais au seul fait de retrouver la mémoire.

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L'ami qui m'a initié à la fiction interactive s'appelle Éric et je l'ai connu parce qu'il avait un groupe appelé Anamnèse. Anamnèse : contraire de l'amnésie. Remémoration.

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Chaque rue est un mystère : qu'y-a-t-il derrière les façades, les portes, les fenêtres ? Je ne me pose souvent cette question en me promenant, et surtout dans les rues que je connais le mieux, où j'ai grandi, et dont parfois je réalise que je ne suis jamais entré dans leurs immeubles, que je n'ai aucune idée de ce à quoi ressemblent les logements et les gens qui les occupent, pas plus que leurs arrière-cours, leurs jardins, leurs caves.

En 2006 j'ai travaillé au CORA de ma ville natale, comme livreur d'électroménager. Ce fut l'occasion d'entrer dans un nombre inespéré de maisons que je connaissais depuis toujours, du dehors, et de faire enfin connaissance avec leur configuration intérieure, leur décoration, leur ambiance. Entrer dans ce genre de lieux, c'était à la fois découvrir un peu plus du réel, et pénétrer dans les mondes esthétiques, émotionnels, moraux, etc, des gens qui y vivaient ou y avaient vécu. Je me souviens d'un vieil immeuble bourgeois, au centre-ville, dont on aurait dit qu'il avait traversé le vingtième siècle sans bouger d'un poil. D'un HLM, aussi, où je n'avais jamais osé mettre les pieds, et où cette fois une petite fille à la voix rauque de vieille fumeuse mystérieuse m'avait guidé vers mon client, à travers des couloirs déserts, aux murs criblés de trous, et même par endroits troués suffisamment pour qu'un homme puisse passer ; on se serait dans un jeu vidéo.

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Tout cela me rappelait aussi certains rêves de jeunesse, où j'explorais des cages d'escaliers qui s'étendaient à l'infini, ou donnaient parfois sur d'autres rues, des immeubles contenant des rues et d'autres immeubles – une ville dans la ville, des mondes imbriqués, et secrets. Il en reste(ra) quelque chose dans Azthath, où l'on peut se perdre dans des couloirs qui semblent infinis, où logements, commerces, zones abandonnées, temples occultes, squats, planques de malfrats, peuvent se suivre de manière totalement incohérente dans un labyrinthe urbain, intérieur et invisible depuis la rue.



Chaque souvenir aussi est une rue, remplie de fenêtres obscures, de portes que l'on aurait pu ouvrir mais dont on ne saura jamais vers quoi elles mènent – ou même, qu'on a bel et bien ouvertes, autrefois, mais dont ce sur quoi elles donnaient a été effacé de notre mémoire.

Autant en faire une fiction, consciemment.

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En établissant une liste des lieux du quartier de Saint-Mihiel que je voulais utiliser pour de la fiction – un PMU, une armurerie, un immeuble abandonné, un vieux marché couvert – il m'est apparu qu'ils pouvaient tous avoir un réel rôle dans une fiction, mais surtout ils avaient tous, une fois mis en relation entre eux, un poids, une charge romanesque encore plus grande – implicite, indéterminée pour l'instant, mais clairement décelable, devinable. Pas besoin d'inventer péniblement : le réel fournit tout ce qu'il faut.

Artificialité chérie

Je me suis promené il y a quelques temps, juste avant l'aube, sur un chemin au bord de la Sarre, près de chez moi. Il longe des champs, des immeubles, une maison de retraite, un stade de foot. Une passerelle permet de rejoindre le parking du Leclerc ; juste après, toujours au bord de l'eau et déjà sur le parking, il y a un endroit étrange, inattendu, où se trouvent des tables de pique-nique, des roseaux, des lampadaires.

Ce mélange de béton et de nature, cette juxtaposition de lieux aux fonctions totalement différentes, donne à l'endroit un côté totalement incongru et artificiel. C'est quelque chose que j'aime depuis longtemps, pour des raisons qui m'échappent en partie. Mais je me suis toujours senti particulièrement bien dans les zoos, les parcs d'attraction, les villages de vacances, les zones commerciales et les quartiers résidentiels les plus artificiels, tous les lieux que je ressens comme factices, ahistoriques et dont la conception même empêche toute sociabilité et toute vie "normale". Des lieux où vivre une aliénation paisible, reposante.

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Cette ambiance artificielle, irréelle, et les lampadaires au bord de l'eau, alors que les ténèbres étaient encore presque totales, m'ont fait repenser à une réflexion que je m'étais déjà faite : ils donnaient l'impression d'être, dans un jeu vidéo, de discrets marqueurs spatiaux, destinés à guider le joueur, sans même qu'il s'en rende compte, vers la bonne destination.

Ce n'est pas la première fois que je ressens cette impression bizarre d'être "dans un jeu vidéo". Voilà ce que j'écrivais en novembre 2009, quand j'avais pris l'habitude de me balader le soir dans la ville.

"Maisons illuminées : fantasmes de vies non vécues, syndrome du voyageur égaré et "ce qui pourrait se passer si je toquais", histoires et personnages qui surgissent du moindre détail vu par la fenêtre. Plus que la maison que l’on espionne et l’intérieur que l’on cherche à voir, c’est toujours sa maison à soi  ; on est voyeur de soi même, on veut se découvrir soi. Images de la décrépitude, de la mort. Solitude du promeneur.

Cité Malleray. Impression d’être dans un jeu vidéo. Le jeu vidéo comme mode d’existence et d’expérience du réel et de la nouveauté. Exploration. Trip, rêve éveillé. Rien n’est réel. Solitude encore une fois.

Devant une belle maison : je me place par rapport au réverbère et aux branches des arbres au dessus de moi, pour avoir la plus belle lumière et le + beau cadrage. Je réalise que je ne vois pas la réalité, je vois mes fantasmes, et je n’aborde pas le réel comme un réel, mais comme une matière esthétique, une œuvre qui ne demanderait qu’à être fixée, en appuyant sur un bouton.

Montée jusqu’au cimetière ; je ne connaissais absolument pas les lieux, je découvre la géographie de la ville en temps réel. Impression à nouveau d’être dans un jeu vidéo. La solitude autorisant presque n’importe quelle action. La pleine lune, énorme, jaune, lovecraftienne. Changement subtil d’ambiance, d’un pas à l’autre, comme plusieurs fois pendant chaque balade ; car chaque coin de rue, chaque nuance architecturale, chaque subtile modification de l’éclairage emporte vers d’autres mondes intérieurs."

Ces balades psychogéographiques ont coïncidé avec mon retour au jeu vidéo, ma découverte de la fiction interactive, et, globalement, mon malheur avec Laurence – pas à cause d'elle, mais avec elle – dont tout était bon pour s'évader mentalement.

À l'abattoir

Au-delà du malheur privé, c'est sans doute la décrépitude de Saint-Mihiel et l'atmosphère, d'une part extrêmement naturelle, sauvage, et d'autre part lourdement historique de la région alentour, incroyablement déprimante et anxiogène, qui suscitait en moi ce besoin d'artificiel et même de virtuel.

C'est une région d'immenses forêts, de vergers et de villages minuscules. On s'y sent loin de tout, dans un monde de chasse et d'agriculture misérable, dans un passé indéfini, sorte d'éternité "vieille France" marquée pour toujours par la Première Guerre mondiale. On trouve encore des tranchées allemandes et françaises, intactes, parcourables, à quelques centaines de mètres des maisons, et où les touristes – concentrés à Verdun, à 30 minutes de route – ne viennent pas. Il n'est pas un arpent de terre qui ne soit pas un cimetière.



Mes beaux-parents d'alors possédaient un grand jardin et des vergers en contrebas des Éparges, ce sommet entièrement remodelé par les bombes. On y comptait des milliers de morts au mètre carré. Mon beau-père ne pouvait pas retourner la moindre motte de terre sans sortir des éclats d'obus, des os, des restes en tous genres (j'en ai conservé un certain nombre, chez moi, quelques années, avant de tout jeter pour purifier l'atmosphère mentale dans laquelle je vivais). Un peu plus loin, dans certaines forêts, la terre était encore empoisonnée. On ne pourrait rien en faire pour encore des décennies, peut-être des siècles.

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Il y avait (et il y a toujours) un élevage de poulets, à côté de St Mihiel. Juste après la ville, à l'écart et en hauteur, à l'orée de la forêt. Comment dit-on, encore ? Né, élevé et abattu en France. Cette biographie minimale aurait largement convenu pour les centaines de milliers de soldats venus se faire tuer dans les environs, avançant bien sagement, en rang, vers le massacre industrialisé. Comme on fait la queue pour prendre le métro.

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En réfléchissant ces derniers temps à la question, je me suis rendu compte qu'être français, ça avait toujours été, pour moi, être pris dans un flux et une appartenance collective, sans que je ne me pose vraiment la question du contenu : être français c'était, dans mon imaginaire d'enfant et d'adolescent, aller à l'école, prendre le métro, s'arrêter dans un relai routier quand je partais en vacances avec mes parents, au milieu d'autres français, issus des quatre coins du pays, dont je ne me faisais qu'une idée vague.

C'était une série d'expériences collectives, parfaitement encadrées, où je n'avais aucun besoin d'être un individu ni aucune question à me poser. C'était une vision abstraite et surtout marquée par les infrastructures. Mais en tant que français de la marge, issu d'une région qui a toujours oscillé entre deux pays, deux langues, deux destins, c'était tout ce qui était à ma portée.

Il me reste quelque chose de cette conception dans mon amour des zones commerciales et de tous les lieux artificiels où la codification totale des comportements, où l'embrigadement maximal dispense de toute vie individuelle, de tout risque de séparation avec les autres – puisqu'ils interdisent tout réel rapprochement aussi.

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C'est chez cette fille que j'ai commencé à travailler sur Inform 7, avec l'aide d'Éric qui a tapé la première mouture du code d'Azthath, pour me montrer comment ça marchait, alors que j'étais initialement parti pour écrire un LDVELH (dont il reste une ébauche en ligne avec des paragraphes qu'il faudra bien que je recycle un jour).





Azthath, comme le jeu vidéo ou Second Life, a été dès le début une façon de fuir, dans l'imaginaire, la pesanteur et la déprime de cet environnement franco-français et criblé d'histoire, comme on est criblé de balles.

Un fantasme de monde hors du temps et melting-pot de multiples styles et influences culturelles, sorte de double de Nancy, mêlé à Paris, Cuba, Prague, que sais-je encore...

Mais le thème de la guerre, de la destruction, du massacre, de la société toute entière enrégimentée, brutalisée et déformée – culturellement, moralement, politiquement – pour des décennies par l'expérience de la guerre, s'est vite invité, infiltré dans Azthath, jusqu'à devenir obsessionnel et éclipsant tout le reste.

"C'est français, Madame, c'est l'I.F française"

Je caresse depuis deux ou trois ans le fantasme d'écrire une I.F dont les décors, le contexte social, etc, s'inspireraient en partie de Saint-Mihiel (et de quelques autres bleds tout aussi décrépis, dans la région, comme Blâmont ou Fénétrange).

Ce qui me séduit le plus dans l'idée est le contexte 100% français, absolument rien d'autre que français, dans lequel baignerait l'histoire. Non pas par patriotisme mal placé, mais parce que la fiction française s'inspire rarement, au fond, de la réalité, passée ou présente, de la France – si l'on excepte le thème parisien, et encore, lui-même relève moins de la réalité que d'une série de clichés marketing destinés à attirer des touristes bientôt victimes du syndrome qui frappe tant de japonais.

La fiction française, donc, s'inspire beaucoup trop du modèle international, anglo-saxon, et j'y ai moi-même sacrifié en travaillant sur des lieux de ma région, du type scieries, lacs, forêts brumeuses, bars au bord de la route... à réutiliser dans des histoires, et en me disant "Génial, on se croirait dans Twin Peaks". Comme s'il fallait passer la réalité française par un filtre américain pour que cela prenne de la valeur.

C'est devenu un sujet de réflexion pour moi depuis une discussion avec Monsieur Bouc, quand est sorti le jeu de Hugo Labrande, Le Kebab hanté. Il me soutenait que c'était admirable parce qu'on ne verrait jamais ça dans un jeu anglo-saxon ; le kebab est une réalité franco-française, presque exclusivement. C'est naturellement très discutable (on mange autant de kebabs en Allemagne et probablement partout en Europe, qu'en France) mais cette idée de réalités culturelles et quotidiennes, réellement spécifiques, inimitables, et ignorées jusqu'ici par la fiction, interactive ou pas, m'a marqué.

Figre Tibre en parle dans une vidéo récente où il évoque son jeu Antioch, dont les personnages sont des policiers "bien français", qui discutent, bouffent et prennent leur temps, et ne sont ni des Experts à Miami, ni des Sherlock Holmes.

Conclusion(s)

Je me souviens que ma compagne alors faisait des rêves récurrents d'inondations, de montée des eaux. C'est devenu pour moi le symbole d'une catastrophe aussi bien psychique que concrète, collective, et je l'ai gardé dans un coin de ma tête, pour une fiction, interactive ou non, "un jour". Cette image m'obsédait moi aussi. Et d'autant plus qu'elle entrait en résonance avec la pochette d'un disque que j'écoutais particulièrement à l'époque, et dont le seul titre, Caught in Flux, "pris dans le flux", me bouleversait, de la même manière difficile à expliquer que la chanson (et le clip) des Talking Heads, Road to Nowhere. Être pris dans le flux des journées, dans le flux de sa conscience, dans le flux des événements historiques, de la vie tout simplement, sans pouvoir jamais en sortir, ni même ralentir. Et cette inondation qui détruit tout en même temps qu'elle est un soulagement, quand la pression est devenue insupportable.

Ce 33 tours, c'est une certaine Laura qui me l'avait offert, à Nancy, en 2002.

Elle continue sa petite vie avec moi, sous le nom de Paloma, dans L'Observatoire. Mais fondamentalement, même si nous nous parlons toujours, nous n'avons plus grand-chose à nous dire, et il serait raisonnable, un jour, de couper le cordon pour de bon. Comme il serait bon de couper le cordon avec Laurence, dont le bébé dans le canapé, même s'il ne parlait pas encore, ne me disait rien d'autre que "Tu n'as plus rien à faire ici".

*

Pour la première fois, lors de ma dernière balade à Nancy il y a quelques semaines, je suis repassé devant un portail, dans une ruelle de la vieille ville, qui mène à une cour d'immeuble, au bout d'un couloir, et qui m'avait toujours fasciné – comme tous les passages "secrets" et tout ce qui laisse deviner des rues, des quartiers, des mondes cachés, privés, forcément mystérieux, des villes dans la ville, comme celles que je voyais dans les rêves de jeunesse que j'ai racontés plus haut, et qui se retrouvent dans Azthath.

Eh bien là, pour la première fois, c'était ouvert et j'ai pu entrer, et bien évidemment il n'y avait rien à y voir, à part une cour. J'y repense maintenant avec un bizarre soulagement, et un peu d'amusement triste, parce que c'est point final tout-à-fait acceptable pour une histoire – une histoire de vingt ans. C'est comme si dans un mouvement de miséricorde Nancy me disait "Tu vois ? Une cour est une cour. Les immeubles sont des immeubles".

Comme si la ville me disait "Tu vois, je n'ai aucun mystère à te cacher. Lâche l'affaire. Tu n'as plus rien à faire ici".

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C'est bien que je compte faire. Terminer ce récit fragmentaire (sous Twine) qu'après avoir intitulé Retour à Nancy, j'ai décidé plutôt d'appeler Adieu à Nancy, qui accompagnera son double fictif L'Observatoire, et qui sera, qui espère être, un point final à d'innombrables choses.

8 juillet 2018

Toujours dans mon trip LDVELH j'ai rejoué aux deux premiers volumes de L'Épée de Légende. Je les trouve très bien écrits, très poétiques, et j'ai même commencé à prendre des notes quant aux champs lexicaux qu'ils utilisent. Mais je dois dire que j'ai été, peut-être pas déçu, mais un peu désillusionné quant à leur richesse ou leur profondeur scénaristique. Chaque séquence de l'histoire ne dure que deux ou trois paragraphes, tout s'enchaîne très vite, et parfois sans grande raison. Reste une ambiance vraiment magique et à mon sens très supérieure à Loup Solitaire.

A comfortable hell

I am beta-testing the game of an artist called Lucila Mayol, that I discovered on a Facebook group dedicated to the F.I.

The game is called No Sign Should Remain Inert, and it seems quite close to my own obsessions – and despite its bugs and its flaws, there is something in the exploration of the house that the game proposes, that is strangely catchy and intriguing.



It feels like you're going through someone else's memories. A childhood home plunged in the half-light – perhaps the light of the memory that is lacking – where one wanders without knowing why, and whose rare objects, the rare elements of scenery are charged with a mysterious sadness – the sadness of the coming revelation maybe. We are visited by vague memories, voices and snippets of past conversations about banalities that reinforce this bitter-sweet impression of summer reverie (the dark house overlooks a garden flooded with light, where one seeks out) and tomb.

Dark places

I have many childhood memories of this kind. Real memories or memories of dreams – including a recurring one which still makes me feel uncomfortable thirty years later. I wake up in my parents' apartment, obviously alone. It is very dark but I do not know if it is day or night. I move as best I can, in my room then in the hallway, then enter the kitchen. When I actuate the switch, nothing happens. The light is out. And I understand in this dream, even as I'm a child, that this is not a simple power outage. Something in the whole universe, in reality itself, has changed. In a variant of the same dream, the switch works, but the bulb emits only a very weak, yellowish light, and I understand again that it is not a simple technical problem – the light itself, the Light with a big L, is somehow dying.

*

I started this article last Sunday evening, alone in the house of my parents (they were gone on vacation). I bought a pizza in the restaurant that faces the railways and ate it while listening to Current 93, very loud in the deserted house, all alone too. Then I went for a walk alone in the streets as the storm began to rumble. I went up alone after dark, and went to bed with the Simpsons.

It was very relaxing and a little exciting to be absolutely alone at my parents' place. Half-heir, half-burglar.



The next day I was a bit idle before the Holy Mass, so I took a walk in the streets. They were absolutely nobody outside. The weather was cold and gray, I could see traces of a night storm; it was probably but not enough to wake me up; maybe I was in a coma. There were no footsteps, no car engines, no human voices, but the birds (and some frogs behind a house) were deafening; it felt like being in the jungle. It sounded like they were telling each other the storm of the night before, and maybe some secrets about an impending end of the world. All that seemed a very good start for a story. But about what ?

*

One night alone at my parents is something that had not happened in years and years – since I left home, actually. I used, as a teenager and then a young adult, during my two years of unemployment after graduation, to stay up late, almost all night, and the family house then became my little private kingdom. I wandered from one room to another, smoked cigarettes, dumped beer packs, took endless baths listening to the silence and the sounds of the house, that I was going to call "organic". The clock. Distant water flowing in pipes. Squeakings.

It was both a pleasant and anguishing feeling; there was something like the feeling of not really being "at home", but – again – in its dark double, both threatening and totally familiar, familiar precisely in what was threatening, and vice versa, like the revelation of something that daily life, agitation, voices, would cover the rest of the time.

No need to go to Silent Hill, to Crouch End, or to call Lovecraftian monsters, gore or degenerate villagers, to enter the dark double of the world – daily life and the objects and places that surround us carry their own load of strangeness and threat. It just takes to turn down the sound a little.







I wrote some words about it.

"He often dreamed that he was alone in the house in the dark, barely lit by the street lights filtering through the shutters. He dreamed of himself smoking a cigarette in front of the building, staring at it to the point of discomfort, to the point of feeling radical strangeness, like when you repeat a word so much that it loses all meaning and familiarity. He was obsessed with sewers and the distant sound of water, very far away, very low, by the bathroom with its pipes whose noises inspired a vague unease. The sound of water flowing through invisible pipes, into walls, and plunging far into the ground."

It is in this same set of small texts that figure what would become my game The Storm:

"A man leaves his house on a stormy night, after hearing repeated screams in the night. He follows the cries that seem as distant as ever as he goes along. What does he eventually find? Himself, naked and curled up, terrified. The house is just an uninhabited ruin. "

The game – which was not really finished at the time of its release for the French Comp – is now corrected, overall, and I'm currently translating it into English. It should take a few weeks, then I will need English-language beta testers / writers who can, preferably, understand the original text. I have two or three candidates in mind.

*

Afterwards, I will be done with this (despite everything, little) game that is The Storm – but not with the theme of houses and haunting, whether it is the haunted houses, or the houses that haunt. This theme has always... haunted me and the parser seems to me the best interface for games dealing with that theme.

A game with rich relationships to build with NPCs, a game with behavioural, moral, strategic choices, etc... does not need a parser essentially dedicated to object manipulation. But here, precisely, to explore, examine, search, use, steal, do everything and anything, in a house lived as a playground - whether the game is serious and even deadly serious, or not - and in a house which, with what it contains, is the very object of the game (stories are about people, not things - but not always) - this requires a parser.

Perhaps, if we consider all the things that life and human relations have to offer in terms of complexity, irrationality and elusiveness, the parser gamers are a kind of refuge, a relaxing and reassuring illusion of control, of logic. One could quite imagine an I.F. with hypertext links, such as the CYOA, filled with abstract, behavioural, moral, relational, very complicated and painful choices, where we would play a guy who between two episodes of this kind, would play parser games, for this feeling of control, for a world decomposable into objects with predictable reactions – and the game would really move from a hypertext link mode to a classic parser mode. Technically, with Inform 7, this is not a problem.

*

I have been working, for a few months now, on another I.F. to be published, which I have entitled The Visit, where we explore an unknown house, much larger and more detailed than the one in The Storm. That's the opportunity to further refine what I started with The Storm in terms of simplifying the parser, or rather bringing the parser closer to everyday language – or what a non-specialist in the I.F. is most likely to type as commands.

I want to be able to type "Go to the bathroom" instead of "Go out, East, South, Come in", "Dress" instead of "Put on pants, put on shirt, put on sweater", I want to type "Turn on the light", "Take a bath", "Make dinner". I want all daily uses of the verbs DO and TAKE to be understood by the program – including teleporting the character-player into the kitchen if the player types "Prepare a meal" while in the bathroom. It only requires creating a few types of rooms, and very simple rules, and it makes the game experience more natural. All this, without removing the possibility of typing more classical, more analytical commands.

There will be, in The Visit, richer actions, a little more investigation and, in a way, several possible ends, depending on the behaviour of the character-player – who will not be completely alone in the house; I'm not saying more for now. Basically, however, whatever the narrative pretext is, the goal is always the same: to wander in a foreign house, like in a closed universe to appropriate, in which to realize all your voyeur and burglar fantasies.

*

I walk a lot these days – my pedometer tells me that I have done a little over two hundred kilometres since the beginning of May. I do not hike in the countryside or on forest paths, because I am losing more and more the taste for nature; I just wander almost every night in the residential neighbourhoods that border my city. I taste the silence that reigns there, and this civility, this peace of the petty bourgeoisie that only morons, thirsting for blood disguised as humanists, can despise.

I look at the houses, sighing with envy towards those who live there, and wondering endlessly (when it would be enough for me to check my bank account and my life choices) why I didn't get that; that delicious regressive and ancestral home sweet home feeling .

I imagine a monster yet to be named, who would break into people's homes; a vampire who would not be thirsty for blood, but for belonging to a place and possessing a place, for belonging to a family and to the world, but inevitably sent back into "outside, into the darkness" (Matthew 25:30).

*

I write this as I think back to James Ellroy, writing about his youth as an alcoholic, a vagrant and a burglar in My Dark Places.



"Fritz maintained a little room adjoining his garage. He kept his records and his stereo shit there. It was his hideout. He never let his parents or sister in. Lloyd, Daryl and I had keys. The room was 20 yards from the main house. The house tantalized me. It was my favorite sex-fantasy bacdrop. I broke in one night. It was late '66.

Fritz and his family were out somewhere. I got down on the ground beside the kitchen door and stuck my left arm through a pet-access hole. I tripped the inside latch and let myself in to the house. I walked around. I kept the lights off and prowled upstairs and down. I checked the medecine cabinets for dope and filched a few painkillers. I poured myself a double scotch and popped the pills right there. I washed the glass I used and put it back where I found it.

I walked through Heidi's bedroom. I savored the smell of her pillows and went through her closet and drawers. I buried my face in a stack of lingerie and stole a pair of white panties. I left the house quietly. I didn't want to blow a shot at re-entry. I knew I'd touched another secret world.

Kay lived directly across the street. I broke into her house a few nights later. I called the house from Fritz's back room and got no answer. I walked over and checked entry points. I found an open window overlooking the driveway. It was covered by a screen secured with bent nails. I pried two bottom nails loose, removed the screen and vaulted into the house.

It was strange turf. I turned a few lights on for a second to acclimate myself. There was no liquor cabinet. There was no good shit in the medicine chests. I hit the refrigerator and stuffed myself with cold cuts and fruit. I explored the house upstairs and down - and saved Kay's bedroom for last.

I looked though her school papers and stretched out on her bed. I examined a clothes hamper stuffed with blouses and skirts. I opened dresser drawers and held a table lamp over them for light. I stole a matching bra and panties. I replaced the window screen and bent the nails back to hold it in place. I walked home very high. 

Burglary was voyeurism multiplied a thousand times."

*

I think that a reconstruction, which I will never do, as an interactive fiction, of James Ellroy's youth burglaries, would be a fucking great idea.

*

I understand only too well this need for transgression and voyeurism in Ellroy, because his own marginality sends me back to mine, less extreme, more banal, but I feel it intensely, and sometimes I smell it too on other men of my generation; a secret and shameful marginality, that you don't fully explain yourself, and that you don't even really know what it is; but it's there, almost indistinguishable in everyday life when you were born into a more or less normal family, with a normal IQ, a more or less normal face, and a more or less normal ability to pretend and play the social game. Something, one day, totally screwed up, and you got off the rails whether you like it or not.

Paradoxically, this marginality leads Ellroy to an unbridled conservatism, undoubtedly caricatural, which is understandable if we consider the interstellar space between his life, which he knows to be out of control, and the images of a normal, healthy life, which he would like to join without succeeding – and when he touches it, it is for dirtying it, like panties stolen during a night expedition. This young Ellroy probably didn't know yet that his only possible destiny was fiction.

"The Establishment? Fuck that. Counterculture rage denotes a new conformity. Every puerile street punk hates the Establishment. Their critique is short on analytical rigor and long personnal pique. Street punk Ellroy knows this. He can't quite voice it epigrammatically. He's a neoconservative crashing in parks and Goodwill bins [...] He created his own shit. The Establishment did not fuck him. He made his own choices. He plumbed his own course. He engaged his own shit. Weird shit. Gooooood shit. Painful shit compounding at a horrible cost. Righteous shit for future pages."

*

This idea that only fiction could make up for certain failures, fill certain gaps, certain absences, repair irreparable things, and that only fiction could allow me to integrate or reintegrate places, people, into my existence, struck me a few years ago, when music stopped being my main activity, that I left for a very small city, with no artistic, professional, personal and mental future.

It took me two years to experience a huge and unexpected relief by understanding – and accepting the fact – that it was no longer necessary to worry about what I was going to become and do with my life, because fiction, the pure and simple refuge in fiction, the pleasure and consolation of inventing other people's lives, would be my way out. It was around 2007-2008.

*

It started with hoaxes. I invented a fake music label, much more interesting than anything I could really do. I created about forty fake Gmail addresses, and a number of Facebook accounts, Wikipedia accounts, and I staged alone intense polemics that some real Internet users took seriously. All this amused me innocently, but then I had a fantasy of fiction contaminating reality, of "terrorism through fiction" which was also part of a little game, between my friend David and me. I have put up posters in my city's streets with slogans from the writer Antoine Volodine / Maria Soudaïeva, with the "red" imagery that accompanies them. I wrote fake university articles on an acousmatic music composer (serial killer and rapist of young men, in his spare time), signed with the name of my Master's degree director. Post-situationnist theoretical texts, half-serious, half-fucked-up, with proclamations such as "

In the future wars of liberation, to the constant rewriting of history to which power is committed for the domination of souls and the world, we must oppose not the search for and secret transmission of any historical truth, the "truth" having now become inaccessible to us, and in any case useless, inoperative, because the true has definitely become a moment of falsehood, but other rewritings – the struggle now being on the sole front of fiction and manipulation, of dreams, of spectacle, of myth".

*

All this was mostly a joke. I believe that the first rather ambitious, and above all sincere, important "work" for me, which I worked on at the time, deals with my good old hometown – which had already served me as a basic material, as a young schoolboy, for a rather crazy and naive pen and paper RPG, which I have already mentioned here. Everything started, this time, from a memory of Christmas 2001: I had unexpectedly spent the afternoon of the 24th in a bar called L'Affiche, accompanied by guys I used to hang out with when I was in high school, and with whom I had founded a rock band, of which there is unfortunately no trace. I hadn't seen them since high school, and over the afternoon, as we played I board games while drinking uncountable beers, more and more well-known faces had entered the bar, people I didn't think I would see again before my death, people I had sometimes entirely forgotten, but that the fact of seeing again moved me a lot. The snow was starting to fall outside, and this whole afternoon seemed like a timeless, magical moment, the kind of time that only comes in books – or at the end of time.



I started writing memories mixed with fiction, fake ads, fake diary entries, fake press articles, on a blog.

I did not publish these things under my name, but under the slightly modified names of classmates or people I met in the past. I later realized, seeing some of them again, that we actually had little more to say to each other, that they had really, definitely come out of my life whether I like it or not, and that the only way to bring things back to life was through fiction.



This is still the case today with the I.F., basically, which I use to bring to life, in tiny worlds, people I love or have loved, that sometimes I even still know, but with whom my relationship is fundamentally dead - like "Paloma" in The Observatory, and so many other NPCs in Azthath or in the other I.F. that occupy me day and night.

*

Of course, we always relapse; we imagine that we still have things to do, that there are places to take or something out there that awaits us. This is obviously not true. It struck me again, painfully, a few months ago, when I had started a kind of photographic quest in the countryside and villages around my home.

I had made myself a kind of exploration diary, almost a quest diary, where I planned to visit this or that place, and once there, noted observations of all kinds. I fantasized about some abandoned buildings that I had seen for years, from the road, away in the fields or in the forest, and I wanted to stop there once and for all to immortalize them and see how much these places could bring me something – for example, I vaguely played with the idea of joining the nearest shooting club, lost in the woods, imagining myself getting to know the local rednecks and deepening my experience, my geographical and social exploration of the area where I live, by this way.

It was when I found myself one afternoon, dying from heat, all alone, on the grounds of a dog training club that fascinated me from the road, and where obviously nothing and no one was waiting for me, nothing that I could integrate into my real life (except buying a Doberman and training him to make saltos), that I wondered what the hell I was doing there, and what the hell I was doing in general.

Including this place, and many others like it, in a fiction or an I.F or at worst, simply mentioning it in my diary, which is a fiction like any other after all, is the only way I can do something with it.

*

Degenerate little towns

Attacking what is considered a monument of interactive fiction has something vaguely embarrassing; what could we write that is new and worth publishing? It's not (only) me who says it, but Emily Short:

"Writing a review of a very well-known and generally loved game is a tricky, not to mention somewhat egotistical proposition."

The difference here is that she loved Anchorhead – and if she loved it, and considering thath I'm not much compared to her, I will certainly not shoot it down, and I don't want to. But finally, I have to admit that I didn't really manage to get in, hang on to it and understand what the program expected from me. It's a game I was looking forward to playing, and even now I would like to like it. But the fact is, if I admire the writing and the little world Michael Gentry built, I didn't like the game they serve.

So I abandoned Anchorhead. I'm still finishing the 1998 version with a walkthrough in front of my eyes, but that's not what I call playing, any more than watching a pedagogical film on reproduction replaces the experience of love. At the risk of repeating myself, the problematic thing was the fact that the player was left to himself from the beginning, without any solid intradiegetic reason to do what he was doing – breaking into the real estate agency, checking which books Michael borrowed once he was found in the library, searching his wallet the next day to consult them, giving a bottle of liquor collected from a bar to a tramp, picking up a SERVIET and keeping it on until the next day, and son on... The only reason (as a player) we could have to do all this, in my opinion, would be to have already played the game for a long time, and to start a new game by trying to do everything right, in the right order, which would violate one of the principles stated by Graham Nelson in The Craft of Adventure:

"To be able to win without experience of past lives"

Emily Short thinks exactly the opposite ("Most of the actions one has to take are information-gathering steps, and they proceed intuitively from what has gone before, require exploration of a kind that fits the plot and the character of the PC, and dole out the relevant information at a nice pace. One piece of the chain naturally suggested to me where I should go to look for the next piece of information, so I rarely felt lost") and I am not pretentious enough to say that it is wrong; also, all this must be a matter of mental wiring. I don't have the right mind for puzzles, no matter how simple they may be. And I perceived Anchorhead as a big puzzle disguised as a story more than a story that uses puzzles to move the player forward, but I'll admit that it's more about me than the game. I could have probably, after ten or twenty years, by trying all the possible combinations, all the actions in all the possible orders, finished the game without ever having felt this natural progression in the story that Short appreciated. What's the point?

As a counter-example I would take the Robb Sherwin games, which I have played in recent weeks – more precisely, Necrotic Drift and Cryptozookeeper. They start in medias res even faster than Anchorhead, I recognize it, but the action (killing zombies in a shopping mall, organizing mutant fights in the back room of a bar) requires less slow rise in tension – and especially, apart from that, Sherwin can spare moments in his games: in Necrotic Drift, after the first scene in the video rental store, you go home with your gang of friends and there's not much else to do but chat to them, and with your girlfriend, while waiting for the action to take place. Just as you spend some time at home, in Cryptozookeeper, after escaping from the alien prison where you meet your companions. Robb Sherwin's games make, as a bonus, an ultra-light use of puzzles, if not non-existent. We always know more or less what we have to do, and where, and the pleasure of playing theses games is not that of the challenge to be taken up, the game to be won, but that of the story to be followed, by participating and embodying, by interpreting (in the sense of following a script) a character – in a way, even if we know almost exactly what to do after each gesture, the mere fact of typing commands to make the main character act is enough to turn the reading experience into a game. And the more it goes, the more I believe that an interactive fiction doesn't need to be much more than that.

What I maintain about Anchorhead is that the game lacks exposure, "useless" scenes and depiction of everyday life, which would comfortably set up the places, characters and story. Things get serious as soon as you arrive in Anchorhead, without even taking the time to unpack once you find the house. I would have liked more banal scenes of this kind, dialogues with Michael, walks in the city, days and nights that progressively pass and install discomfort and the need, for both the player and the character, to start investigating.

*

I speak of unease, but in reality, as is it often the case in horror films or novels, the atmosphere has something curiously comfortable, soothing in its very darkness. There is something attractive about these decrepit, unhealthy settings, in the tranquility of this small, degenerate town – you want to sit among the drunkards in the bar near the real estate agency, and stay with them in silence, or to wander along the tracks that the tall grass gradually invades. To enjoy the entropy that invades everything, and indeed, not to unpack, not because there is an urgent mission to accomplish, but to renounce all normality.

It seems that Michael S.' personal website Gentry is down now. I don't know if that's where I read an article he wrote a few weeks ago for the release of Anchorhead (version 2018), but I remember his last sentence, which struck me; it said in substance:

"Now I know, Anchorhead is my home, and I will never leave it."

It confirms my first intuition about this game, and my interest in it: behind the horrific machinery is clearly perceptible the author's attraction to his fictional world, the voluptuousness he feels in describing it, not in spite of himself, but because of what he has of horrific, repugnant, unhealthy.

For Michael Gentry, Anchorhead is the house full of tricks in which he locks himself up and decides to live Des Esseintes, and when he exclaims at the sight of the spotted leaves of a caladium, "

Everything is syphilis", we must hear a nuance of secret voluptuousness, of happiness.

Anchorhead made me think of Current 93, which I mentioned earlier, and which I have listened to a lot in recent months, including, therefore, exploring the game, with hectolitres of beer and solitary walks in the fields, talking alone about interactive fictions on my dictaphone, not to forget anything, and sometimes finding unexpected oases in the middle of the infinite bad trips that nature is not supposed to inspire, but which increasingly make me stay home.

Undoubtedly the rainy aspect of these minimalist and sad compositions at the piano, David Tibet's hallucinated, haunted, incantatory vocals are no stranger to the relationship that has finally established itself in me between the group and the game, with its atmosphere of greyness, deliquescence and cosmic threat. Current 93 also incredibly cultivates this duality, this ambiguity of which I speak above, between an absolute nihilism, and curiously childish, soft, and comfortable atmospheres. I wonder how Tibet is handling this, he who has been calling himself a Christian for a few years now and who we see (in a video) making the sign of the Cross before drawing a pastel representing the confrontation between Christ and Satan.



This Current 93 / Anchorhead report is even more obvious when we know the now long friendship and collaboration between David Tibet and Thomas Ligotti, high priest of both Lvecraftian and existentialist horror, whose text below could almost be among the piles of excerpts from diaries, press clippings, family albums, mystical texts, etc... that we meet in Anchorhead.

And as if by chance, it's called This Degenerate Little Town.

"The greatest secret,
perhaps the only secret,
is that the universe,
all of creation,
owes its existence
to a degenerate little town.
And if it were possible
to strip away the scenery that surrounds us,
to pull up the landscape
of every planet,
to rip away the skies
and shove aside the stars and suns,
to tear from ourselves our own flesh
and delve deep into our bones,
we would find it standing there eternal,
the origin of all things visible
or invisible,
the source of everything that is
or can be,
this degenerate little town.


And then we would discover
its twisted streets
and tilting houses,
its decaying ground
and rotting sky.
And with our own eyes
we would see the diseased faces
peeking from grimy windows.
Then we would realize
why it is such a secret.
The greatest and most vile secret.
This degenerate little town
where everything began
and from whose core of corruption
everything seeps out.."



It's true, that we want to walk around in this Degenerate Little Town – and that there is a real seduction of filth, ugliness, nothingness. A real peace, which we do not dare to admit, but which is at the bottom of every human mind. Baudelaire says: "There are in every man, at all times, two simultaneous postulates, one towards God, the other to Satan. The invocation to God, or spirituality, is a desire to rise in rank, that of Satan, or animality, is a joy to descend down" – and where to descend, if not ever further in flesh, in the world, in an incarnation that would no longer be related to any transcendence, to any elevation?

And that is the meaning of the too narrow word animality; the degenerated villagers of Innsmouth are less so because they come from relationships between Deep Ones and human women, than because they are nothing more than matter, comfortably rooted here on earth, and wanting to be nothing more than themselves, infinitely and eternally themselves.

And it is my reading, too, of the theme of incest in Anchorhead – beyond the occult plot that interests me, basically, not at all.

*

"But like no other phenomenon
that we have ever faced,
this degenerate little town,
under its rotting sky,
standing upon decayed ground--
a landscape of a pain
that is like no other--
may be our last hope,
the only hope we have
of killing all the hopes
we have ever had
and murdering every mystery
we have ever cherished,
so that we may step forth, finally,
into that great shining kingdom
of which we have always dreamed."

To kill every mystery, to kill every hope for something else, and to draw happiness, a true and terrifying happiness, from a universe devoid of meaning, degenerating, falling, forever. A comfortable prison, a little personal and comfortable hell.

*

It is also, I believe, the primary source of the pleasure I took in playing Pathologic, with its streets becoming emptier every day, its monstrous children, its brownish houses and gnawed away by an evil whose origin has, in essence, no importance. I already talked about it a few years ago:

"It's not its gameplay, or even its story, that makes me like this game and start over from the beginning, a few months after my first game. I realize, by playing it again, that wandering all day and night, searching the garbage cans, is more than enough for me; wandering through the small streets, walking along the walls of the cemetery, attracted by the pale light of the streetlights, in the middle of the dead leaves carried by the wind."




"The sets are poor and repetitive, the scripts too (leaves in the wind, passers-by who walk or stagger), the colours are dull; and it is precisely what gives the game its charm, what makes it fascinating; what gives it an identity. The world we travel through is repetitive and insistent like a nightmare; wherever we go, everything is the same, everything seems to be running in slow motion, there is no one to talk to – the inhabitants of the city seem from the beginning lost in their dreams themselves – nothing seems never to really change; whatever the events that take place over the days and that justify the quests. We're in the world of the grave."

*

I mentioned my hometown above. Another one of my own degenerate Little Towns is the city in which I was a student. I am painfully aware of this, and aware of the ball and chain it represents on my ankle, to such an extent that I am beginning to consider simply breaking up with it, not going back, not thinking about it – as much as I can (probably very little). It will be twenty years ago, in September, that this city entered my life; I moved there, for my studies, on August 9, 1998. The first night I spent walking around and exploring the areas around my apartment, I picked up a completely stoned prostitute from the ground and brought her home. She told me the complete horror that summed up her life – her dead son, her father who shot himself in the mouth – as we walked through streets and alleys, then the dark, dusty, damp corridors of her building. After which I had no choice but to return it to its pimp, a pig named Hassen, which she had described to me during our journey as really kind-hearted. He was an absolute caricature of a pimp with his rings and fake nonchalance, while the girl, unable to stand any longer, sat on the floor with her back to the wall. Her name was Nathalie and she must not have lived very long, because I hung out a lot on and around that street in the years that followed, and I never met her again. But she was my first meeting, my initiator in the mysteries of that town.

*

Needless to say, I suppose, Nathalie is pursuing a parallel existence, as a NPC, in Azthath.

*

This city and its alleys have been haunting me for twenty years, with their rusty metal shutters and blackened facades, their dying hydrangeas at the corner of the "rue de Turique", its fallow allotments along the canal, its whore bars and private mansions, its old districts gradually demolished and replaced by giant cinemas and hipsters hutches.



Just as my childhood dreams and adolescent intuitions in the family home, which were difficult to formulate at the time, gradually built in me a double mind of my hometown, cultivated through fiction to make it ever more my comfortable and intimate little world, and finally contaminating my relationship with the real city, so too, countless memories, as refined over the years, and countless dreams about the town, which seemed to me to reveal a hidden truth about this city and its role in my life, eventually replaced the real city, forcing me to exile myself ever further from the city centre, to neighbourhoods where I am sure I find this atmosphere of decay where I can finally breath.

*

Maybe I'm lying to myself in part, moreover, and I plan not to go back there again, not to escape its dark double, which catches me as soon as I set foot there, but on the contrary, to keep it intact under my skull, preserved from the time that goes forward and lead my little regressive life there, for good, with my company ghosts.

The psychological prison where one locks oneself up with happiness (joy of descent), with fiction as a technique, is a dimension of the encarclement.

*

I tried to write about this inevitable degeneration of places as mental refuges, in a game project dedicated to a certain place, in the mountain, that I loved as a child.



The character-player wanders more or less in places he knew in his childhood, which have always haunted his mind and where he returns to confront his dreams:

"Your memory, what you thought was oceanic, infinite, is just that: a succession of clichés, few in number, poor, showing you faces of which you know nothing, and which have nothing to say to you. All you have to do now is leave.

Maybe you came here to ruin your memory. To unbewitch you. Free yourself from memories that are too heavy. And above all, too loaded with false stakes. For years you have lived with these places in a corner of your head, metastasizing in your dreams, your fantasies, your intimate stories, the shadows that you too often prefer to the prey – places of your real life, places where you could really live, and that you do not want or know how to see.

Unable to live in reality, you survive in ever poorer dreams. Your imagination is stupid, mutilated. Visions that you are unable to convert into stories, into anything communicable, alive. You keep your stories in mind, in a comforting, protective blur, and it is this blur that they all really speak about. Your inability to imagine your own stories, characters, their living relationships. You can only talk about yourself and the desolation you feel."

The fact that I failed to write this game, to find a motivating goal for the player, a reasonable number of events and adventures to include, in short to make it something other than a sordid walk in my own head, is probably significant. Either an intrinsic limit (in terms of interest...) to games such as The Storm, or a personal limit that I am beginning to approach, and that I have begun to see with Azthath, already, which also relies a lot on this "sinister geographical and internal wandering" concept.

Maybe small degenerate cities end up unbearable for the mind. Maybe you end up not breathing so well in your own little hells.

*

In the hundreds of dreams I have noted over the past twenty years, I have a staggering number of occurrences of the apartments and houses I have lived in since I was born. There are almost always the same small number of situations – for example, I come back alone at night, and the apartment where I grew up is completely empty. Even the walls have disappeared. Or I break into the basement of the house where we lived when I was in high school; I sneak in and explore, like a thief, sometimes I go through my old, forgotten, relegated stuff down there, including my canvases and the wooden panels on which I painted. In my dreams, I rediscover a part of myself and our family's history, completely hidden the rest of the time, and when I wake up in the morning, for a few hours, it all gets to me. Then I forget. I know that one day my parents will be dead and I will have to do all this for real.

I'm not sure why, probably because I'm spending less time in front of the computer these days, and rediscovering more physical, more manual hobbies, including drawing and painting, I recently started, despite all, this personal archaeological work, and reviewed my old paintings, some of which I had forgotten until now.



One of the great advantages of aging is to develop a peaceful indifference to my own lack of talent. Of course, as a teenager, in front of my typewriter and notebooks, I thought I was Stephen King or William Burroughs; of course, painting in my parents' garage, I could already see myself sailing from one opening to the next, between two crises of delirium tremens, a fully cursed artist, and it is also true that once I had started making music, I published demos and albums as if the world's fate depended on them. You don't do anything at all if you're not at least a megalomaniac.

But fifteen, twenty or twenty-five years later, I think I can say that the idea of being a Sunday artist, and nothing more, as there are fishermen or Sunday footballers, is an idea that not only no longer is a problem for me – compared to other things, for example the death of the people I love – but is even curiously relaxing. There is no issue here. I can quietly compose nonsense, write stories that go nowhere, or use my brushes to produce the kind of paintings you'll find in every kindergarten and asylum. Fiction or blogging are exciting but tiring activities; you dig into yourself painfully. Incompetent painting relaxes me, it allows me to completely abandon myself to my natural idiocy.

Lucila Mayol, of whom I spoke at the beginning of this article, is also and above all a plastic artist, of whom I love enough – it is rare enough to be mentioned – the installations.





Her slightly bittersweet work reminds me, in a less "spectacular" way, of the installation of the artist Vincent Greilsamer, described by Michel Houellebecq in The Possibility of an Island. The narrator, Daniel, a comedian made rich and famous by his cynicism, malice and vulgarity, visits the artist's house (a member of the "Raelian" sect that will eventually convert all of humanity, and make it mutate into a new species) which encloses his work, an installation with an almost supernatural effect, a series of animated paintings (a wedding, a train trip, dogs and masters) showing an idyllic and kitschy world, without anxiety, without separation, without harm.

"I have chosen to create a small, easy world where you only encounter happiness. I am perfectly conscious of the regressive nature of my work; I know that it can be compared to the attitude of adolescents who, instead of confronting the problems of adolescence, dive headfirst into their stamp collection, their herbarium, or whatever other glittering, limited, multicolored little world they choose. No one will dare say it to my face, I get good reviews in Art Press, as in the majority of the European media; but I could read the contempt in the eyes of the girl who came from the Delegation for Plastic Arts. She was thin, dressed in white leather, with an almost swarthy complexion, very sexual; I understood at once that she considered me to be a little invalid child, and very sick. She was right: I am a tiny little invalid child, very sick, who cannot live. I can’t come to terms with the brutality of this world; I just can’t do it."

Daniel writes (since the novel is his confession) later:

"I also understood that irony, comedy, and humor were going to have to die, for the world to come was the world of happiness, and there would no longer be any place for them there."

In this "world of happiness" (which in Christian language is called the Kingdom, and which is, as we are told, already in our midst) irony and humour, which are dimensions of violence, should no longer have a place, but beyond, fiction itself should disappear, to the benefit of being, and of real acts, of the total investment of reality, of the total realization of reality, in reality. Fiction is indissolubly linked to imprisonment in its own constructions, its own lies (personal or those of a culture, an era), lies and comfortable. It is a dead-end – or its outcome is its own condemnation.

It should be noted that in The Possibility of an Island, Vincent Greilsamer only leaves his basement and the idyllic installations he builds there sickly, for the real world, after a totally unexpected external event, which allows him (as the new guru of a cult with unlimited financial and scientific resources) to make his dreams come true, to renew himself as a person, and to renew the world.
Barbey d'Aurevilly wrote about Huysmans' À Rebours (Against the grain):

"After such a book, it only remains for the author to choose between the muzzle of a pistol in his mouth – or the foot of the Cross."

This idea could be extended to fiction in general.

And we can think that at the end of fiction, as a practical and as a way of relating to reality, the Deus Ex Machina which allows all the Vincent Greilsamer to leave their dark, infernal, false and so comfortable cellar, for life – may be a real God.