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.
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.
