Turducken

I don't know why I'm rushing to find another project. I'm finally into the meaty scenes of this novel. The stuff I was looking forward to doing when I started this book.

Took three days to hammer out a draft of the "Footloose" scene. That's one of those scenes that's not in the outline but comes organically out of the story. From the first moment I introduced Penny to Alamogordo and sent her to a Blake's Lotaburger, I realized there was a thing I could do there. 

It grew, until it became a scene where Penny confronts a bully like something out of an '80s movie -- a connection she, with her Media Arts degree, makes herself. Which is why the scene indirectly references Flashdance, Back to the Future, Footloose, and War Games. But I also name-drop the Marianas Trench and Manchester United. 

(You might also count in Breaking Bad, as a Blake's makes frequent appearances in that as well.)

It ain't about the name-dropping. That's just an observation. The scene is about how we see ourselves in movies, how some of the plots in movies reflect unhealthy trends in our society, and the point of it is Penny finding a way not to play out those tired old stereotypes. But it is really a side-note scene, at best the resolution of a tiny sub-plot; the real thing going on is pulling her off the path of solving the mystery no matter what, and placing her emotionally where she can take a different path at WIPP as well.

Anyhow, I've been thinking less of potpourri, and more of sequences that stack multiple elements to make something bigger than one alone. And I've been trying to figure out a simple way to describe one of these Turducken set-pieces in the Horizon Zero Dawn series, that becomes one of the more memorable sequences in the second game.

Our protagonist, Aloy, travels to the ruins of Las Vegas, now half-buried in the sands, on her quest to rebuild the terraforming system needed to bring the Earth back from disaster.

When the terraforming system was attacked, key sub-functions achieved a sort of unhappy self-awareness and fled to whatever distant surviving servers they could use as hosts. POSEIDON took refuge in Las Vegas, its arrival triggering the old desalinization plant and flooding the ruins of a grand casino that was once the center and showpiece of Vegas -- a Vegas already rescued from the desert once, through the efforts of a man named Stanley Chen, both investor and inventor of that desalinization system.

With me so far? A lot of stories might have stopped at the vista of ruined casinos overtaken by the desert sands. That's pretty spectacular already. But a big part of the adventure takes place in the transformed lower floors, now filled with water and the holographic illusions of sea life as a drowned god dreams.

In the middle of this mix is a trio of Oseram delvers, their leader driven by visions of the Vegas that once was discovered then lost again by his father. Delvers who are also showmen and who make the choice in the end to stay and to rebuild the town once again. And all three have amusing quirks and work well off each other; these are hardly throw-away side characters.

And as you the player explore, completing the challenges and puzzles to return POSEIDON to the task of saving the world, you encounter recordings that outline the story of Stanley Chen; his betrayal by his own business partners, his long-shot gamble at reviving Vegas, his success, and his final lonely trip through the town he had saved and made his home as the terraforming fails and the deserts sweep in again...leaving the computer core running out of sheer nostalgia, never dreaming of how that would one day save Vegas again in ways he could not have imagined.

Of course, all of this is set against the story of the Horizon Zero Dawn series, and Aloy's own personal journey. Themes and plot and story and character are all near-seamlessly interwoven with game mechanics. The very traversal mechanism (a sort of magitech SCUBA mask) that you use comes from those Oseram delvers and their personal story arc. (One reviewer used the subtitle "Gear and Clothing in Las Vegas.")

I love it when you can pull together different elements like this. I was recently trying to talk about this in a Reddit answer to a writer's question about using AI for inspiration. I am split here. Stated baldly, you could assemble one of the combinations mad-lib style. Or with a dartboard, or via ChatGPT. The tough part is joining them in writing.

But I think it is more likely you would come up with a winning combination because you understood the kinds of connections that worked for the story you wanted to tell. So you aren't trying to force something from a limited selection into working. Instead you are open to ideas, so when you are in the middle of constructing a story or story part, you recognize the germ of a thing that could be added in as it floats by in the form of a random news story, a face in the crowd, a spilled cup of coffee. Instead of an external generator of ideas, the story itself generates them out of wisps and whispers.

I do still expect a few more of those. I recently added a sort of apocalypse log to the Atlas Missile sequence, which I hope will make that more interesting (and is also my current solution for getting both Project Pluto and the next clue for the mystery into what otherwise is a bare silo).

The beats weren't quite working. This would be a good time for Penny to make some wrong choices, to fail a little, and for once not be so analytical about things. 

So Wargames is out, but Kubrick is in. Not the one you are thinking of, either. This isn't a line quote but a cinematographic quote; the Kubrick Stare.