Curse

In Bag of Bones, King tells the story of a writer in the throes of a writer's block who suddenly finds feverish inspiration at a time when he should be concentrating on real life and real things to do. In Lunar Park, Ellis finds himself pursued by a ghost – a benevolent one, in fact - who wants to prevent him from writing his next book, because it would cost him his relationship with his son. Both books say the same thing: creativity can be a curse, because it takes away from real life, whether inner or concrete.

Text-based game or interactive fiction?

This evening, as often, I was walking through the streets, stopping in front of a few wealthy properties and dreaming about what I might find if I were to break in – what stories those houses might conceal – and my thoughts drifted toward interactive fiction.

I wondered to what extent the term "interactive fiction" is truly relevant for describing all those games played by typing commands on a keyboard. For instance, La Secte Noire – is it really interactive fiction? I don’t think so. Certainly, one types commands like "north, west, take sieve, sift water, take key", and so on, but it’s really the graphics that give the game its atmosphere and identity. It’s by looking closely at them that the player imagines what actions to take to progress. At no point does the text hold any fundamental informative or poetic value. And the "text" interface used to act in the game could easily be replaced by a mouse-based system without distorting La Secte Noire in any way.

Conversely, one can easily find games that truly claim the label of interactive fiction – for instance, Lieux Communs – where the text is the fundamental medium of the game; it performs both the informational and poetic functions. It is irreplaceable; it is the object of the game. In that sense, it is more of an interactive literary work than a video game.

From this, it follows that when one sets out to create a game, one must find one’s proper place between these two extremes: the pure game with a text-based interface (be it adventure, role-playing, management, or strategy) and the interactive literary work. This, concretely, raises questions of rules, game systems, variables, and so on – should I prioritize variables that modify the atmosphere of the game, its textual variations, its narrative twists? Or "harder" variables that define the characteristics of characters, objects, and environments? In short, should one write rules that describe a realistic and consistent world – a kind of text-based sandbox like GTA or Daggerfall – or rules that make the narrative elements of a story shift and evolve?

It seems to me that making a clear choice of category is a necessity if one wishes to do good work.

Interactive fictions

I've been working for a few weeks on what is called an "interactive fiction".

Basically, a text-based adventure game, not necessarily entirely text-based (there may be illustrations) but whose operation, whose gameplay, is entirely text-based.

A world in which events, characters, in short, everything is described by text, and where the player enters textual commands to act.

It may sound ultra primitive, but the capabilities of today's computers, compared to those of the 80's - when the great standards of this genre were released, for example, on CPC, The Black Sect, Omeyad, Sram 2, Orphée – and the possibilities offered by modern programming languages, such as Inform7, which I use, make the games almost infinite in size and complexity.

So I am, for the moment, because it will grow again, at no less than 520 places where the player can move. Nothing prevents me, apart from the work time, from adding twice or three times as many, or ten times as many, to create a world or a city that is rich and explorable in its every corner. With an equally virtually infinite number of non-player characters and items to manipulate, missions and subplots, in short, as on Zombo.com there is no limit other than the imagination.

Of course, I wouldn't hate to have an illustrator with a brain directly connected to mine, who would give an objective, immediate, visual existence to what I'm clumsily trying to translate into sentences. But having a tool as powerful as Inform7, and as easy to use, is already unhoped-for.

The programming language resembles the human language. Its syntax is quite rigorous, but once you get the hang of it, it works on its own.

Example:

HeadRoomHouse is a room. It is north from MaisonChefCouloir. The printed name is "In the bedroom". The description is "[if unvisited]You enter the bedroom of what was once the Bauer couple. The cupboards are open, their contents spilled on the floor, desecrated. The bed has been used as a latrine. Whoever came here obviously did everything they could to defile this place. You are in the bedroom. The cupboards are open, their contents spilled on the floor, desecrated. The bed has been used as a latrine[end if]".

A code that defines the existence of a room (HeadRoomHouse), its name on the screen and its descriptive text, with variables (the text varying if the room has already been visited, or not). Let's admire the economy of means!

Another one: 

Every turn when the Prostitute is in the location of player:

If a random chance of 1 in 10 succeeds

begin;

say "[one of]The girl smiles at you with a teasing look. The girl: 'Do you want to come along, my wolf? The prostitute lights a cigarette and sighs. The prostitute looks exhausted, the night is going to be long; you feel sorry for her. The girl, in a whining voice: 'Do you have some booze? [The girl brushes her hair back, holding a small oval mirror in one hand. The girl nods discreetly to her pimp, who is standing in the distance. The girl smiles at the men who pass by, looking at them from head to toe, without modesty. The prostitute runs her fingers through her hair, sighs. The girl smiles at you with a slightly sad look. In random order";

end if.

A code, here, that allows to display randomly, when the player is in the presence of a non-player character, some ambiance messages, purely free of charge, but that give an impression of life, of autonomy of the game world.

Again, minimal code, for something that really brings to the game – and in a language so close to human that it requires no learning as such. The manual of the software is sufficient for most of the cases where the syntax is a possible problem.

So I'm enjoying creating a city as large and rich as possible, where the player can lead an absolutely non-linear life. Maybe I'll try (technically, it's a bit more difficult, but feasible) to take a model from GTA, in the "total freedom / no end" genre. And why not work constantly to increase the game, by sending updates to my players, who will be able, without losing their saves, to constantly have new places to explore, new objects, new situations to discover.

Until a language is simple and powerful enough to generate these new features by itself.

*

That being said:

I consider interactive fictions as an authentic ludic genre, in its own right, but also as an authentic literary genre – they could be in the 21st century, what the novel was in the 19th and 20th; a place of exploration of reality and human problems, and of reflection, even of proposal (political, philosophical) where an even greater identification of the "reader", and even a form of cyber-bovarianism will make the thing even more effective.

On the condition that we mutate the novel itself, by integrating into it all that the F.I. has of labyrinthine, of variant, of random, but also of redundant, of buggy, of limited – because it is also, in the same way as the traditional narration, but at another level, a faithful image of reality.

I imagine a book – can we still say a novel? but in the end what does it matter – whose text would resemble a video game source code.

A thrifty, precise, systematic, ordered, hierarchical language, which, without those damn stylistic effects that rot literature – and which are not "style" – establishes a world.

A text that integrates the different levels of consciousness and reality that we go through every day – the daily, mechanical, almost unconscious acts – daydreaming, memories – the waking dream that are the virtual worlds in 2D or 3D, etc.

It is not a question of "making science fiction". It is not about gimmicks or literary processes to be in the air of time.

I started reading a novel this afternoon that says it better than I can in a few sentences:

"Coding is everything that poetry meant to me back when we were in college. Precision, eloquence, power, completeness. Fourteen lines can fill you with the entire universe."

God wrote the source code for the universe. There is nothing to stop us from imitating him.

The pure pleasure of imagination

I wonder why I waited fifteen years to continue doing what I did so well, and with such unconceivable pleasure, as a teenager: sitting down in front of a piece of paper and inventing a world, without worrying too much about what I was going to do with it. The sheer pleasure of imagining, of building. A mental refuge, too.

*

Surfing around on pages talking about video games, virtual reality, eXistenZ, etc., I came across an extract from a manifesto that affirms or reminds us of the simple truth that video games combine all the arts, without losing their primary identity as games. And that it doesn't cut itself off from reality, but enriches it – because it's "everyday life" that's cut off from reality, from the primary realities of life and being. Hence the reflection I made to myself, that so-called Contemporary Art ™ was really, definitively, without appeal, a total imposture; the only art that synthesizes all the others, the only art that involves the "spectator" 100%, the only art that is totally part of life, is the video game.

Things that would be better left underground

I'm scratching and scratching in my notebook at the moment, reorganizing, sorting and seeing what I can develop from my writings over the last few months... there are trends, themes, fundamental things that hint at the beginning of a "work", which I don't know what form it will take, if it's going to take one at all. This has its exciting sides, and at the same time, this kind of undertaking always leaves me with a vague unease... the impression of delving, of digging into things that would do better to remain underground and informal. I also feel like I'm tackling something too big for me, something hopeless.

Compulsive writing

Compulsive writing yesterday in my pretty Moleskine, instead of working – there are days like that when I'm like a lion in a cage, I open my notebook and close it, go through the pages, look for something to scribble, draw, write, something to move me forward as if I had a project in progress, which I might... often failing to create anything, I build projects, I plan, I delimit, I lay the foundations... foundations of nothing... it's just a matter of calming anguish and the need to create-something in the same way as others need to get drunk or punch someone...

Luckily, at any rate, I managed to overcome this state yesterday, with a mental kick up the backside, which enabled me to write instead of eternally preparing to write. I owe this to Dean R. Koontz, who got me unstuck from the pulp novel by rereading Lightning.

Stories only really come to life when you write them, not before. The story is created as you write it, it imposes itself: the characters, the events, the rhythm of the narrative. When I read that Stephen King wrote Running Man in three days (or is it three weeks? either way, it's madness), I tell myself I've still got a long way to go...

When I also think that Danielewski worked on House of Leaves for twelve years...

Rereading Dean R. Koontz

Rereading Dean R. Koontz makes me want to write again. He's not a humiliating author to read, not like Borgès, or Matthieu Terence, or Volodine, or who knows? No, Koontz offers simple stories, simple characters, simple language, and the whole thing is enjoyable and effective. A storyteller's work.

The elitist conception of literature, that of academics and critics, is increasingly repugnant to me. As far as I'm concerned, the novel is only incidentally a major art form designed to explore the possibilities of language and narrative; it didn't emerge in human history to culminate in the french "Nouveau Roman". For all men, including the humblest and most limited, and even especially them, it is a tool for understanding the world and for consolation; for consolation, for compensation, for life by proxy, for wishful thinking too, and for memory. Cavemen were probably already inventing stories around the fire, in which the hero saved the clan, and his questions, perhaps, enabled the most limited of warriors to formulate their own questions through the mouth of the storyteller. That's what literature is, fundamentally.

An added charm of this 80s fantasy/horror literature: the book cover illustrations...

Extravagances [english]

A while ago I started a list of things I want to do before I die. It started as a joke with David, saying that we should make a list of what we had left to accomplish, alone or together. And then when I actually started making that list, more and more things came to mind, and they continue, day after day.

Just writing them down is a pleasure that is hard to explain. It's like finally allowing myself to do certain things, to finally decide to act, to live instead of dreaming, regretting, dwelling. Fantasies to realize, links to renew, things to repair, to solve, to close. Extravagances that I would like to finally allow myself. Little desires that I had deprived myself of until now, without any real reason. Strangely enough, making this list, which has a "Let's put our affairs in order before we die" feel very stimulating. And writing all these things down makes it easier to do them – I've already started implementing some of the projects.

It remains to be seen what consequences all these actions will have on my life. What it will challenge. What it will change in my relationships with others, with those involved. It's like the story of the guy who learns he has cancer, and who empties his bank account, sleeps around, travels everywhere and prepares to die, then doesn't die, after all.

Shallow ground

Today I saw Shallow ground, which tells the story of a small rural community on the edge of the forest; an unsolved murder, a disconsolate widow and a sheriff's office that is about to close... but that will have to reapply when a naked teenager, covered in blood, carrying a knife that was used in the murder of a young girl a year earlier, appears; an appearance that is only the first of a long series of supernatural manifestations. We don't understand what's going on any more than the protagonists do until the almost end of the film, which is not a big revelation or a reversal of the situation, but rather a slow enlightenment – spoiler alert: the dead come back for their executioner.

All of this made me want to write again – I too, before I die, want to write my own Salem or my own Pet Sematary. I had started a novel with David as co-writer, a few months ago, but in a more gory register, without any aesthetic, psychological, or even narrative research – we just wanted to see if we were able to do like these hobo writers who survive by publishing ten thrillers or horror novels, or porn, or all of them at once, every month of the year.

Maybe I should do what I did with my first novel, which was never published and never really written, except for a few scenes, a very detailed outline and tons of notes and comments... imitate Borgès and write a short story about that book, as if it existed and someone else had written it. Maybe I should write down ideas of characters, places, situations, in no order, and shake it all up. My own psyche will make sense of this mess after a while.

Note from June 7, 2019:

Thirteen years later, I still haven't done anything with it. I've never found – this must be a talent of its own – a monster or supernatural manifestation that I wouldn't be deeply ashamed to include in a story, taking things at least a little seriously. Maybe I'm an uptight nerd, deep down. Maybe I'm also horrified enough by real life, everyday life, and more and more, that no supernatural monster seems to me to be able to really compete with cancer, rape, wars, the absurdity of life. I regret it a bit, because writing a real horror novel without frills, that stains, that scares, that takes its monsters seriously (I'm thinking of Dean R. Koontz's Phantoms, for instance) must be a very relaxing exercise.