Gormenghast

I found another panto on YouTube with good picture quality, good production quality, and even though it is a 2020 production this one is traditional.

 A proper Boy, a good Dame, and they even have a Panto Horse. But then comes this moment:

The villain enters Stage Right. The Good Fairy enters Stage Left. They explain the story to come and they do so in rhyming verse and all of a sudden we're back 400 years or more, seeing something strange and unfamiliar, something straight out of the Mystery Plays. A glimpse into ritual and deep history.

And then it's back to jokes about social distancing and pop songs and pies to the face. Craig Fergusson once described panto as Mama Mia performed by the Three Stooges for the audience of the Rocky Horror Picture Show. I'm not sure you could do better. I did a whole chapter on it in the London book but even then my protagonist ended up calling it indescribable.

That idea I had over brunch continued to grow. It isn't just Penny thinking about family and finally explaining a little to the reader. This is going to be Gally's first real appearance (she was previously in a brief phone call from Japan). And she's going to do something that opens up the question again of whether there might be a reason Penny's been having all these adventures.

Like I said, series isn't selling. My confidence isn't growing, either. But I am getting closer and closer to resuming writing anyhow.

One Step Closer

Reading a fascinating book on the birth of nuclear secrecy. Okay, that's getting a little off the subject, but I'm counting it as research for the New Mexico book because that's as close as I've gotten to actually writing anything since I don't know.

But over brunch today mom made a random comment and I suddenly had a strong "B" theme for a different book. The vikings book. It struck me that I'd really like to get Penny back into music, and in the process have her go into her own history and reveal a lot more about her family. This would be the book for it. Of course, I don't have a plot for that book. I have a situation and a way to put Penny in the middle of things, but there's no crime, no artifact, no murder, nothing to hang an actual "Archaeological Adventure" on.

Not that the New Mexico book is plotted yet. I know a lot about the hole the MacGuffin goes into, but not what it is. At least at the stage where I am, I have a lot of leeway. I don't need a thing to be in the grave. I just need something to be radioactive. And for the archaeologists to discover it accidentally (or the coroner's office; either works.)

Other than that, finished my archive binge, bought three books, watching panto now. As I type this, the ITV "All Stars" production of 2000 just asked some "random audience members" to cover a scene change with a little music, and said ringers -- S Club 7, a bubblegum pop band I'd never heard of -- are going through their hit "Never Had a Dream Come True."

Yeah, that's panto. 

Aidendum

I got thinking about interactivity in games.

Okay, not to lump on Beyond:Two Souls more. It's failure isn't really interactivity. Cage designed it as a cinematic story presentation that was equally accessible to non-gamers. That's a trend recently; Horizon Zero Dawn is one of several games that offers a "story mode" difficulty where the combat is simplified, de-emphasized, or even done for you.

(Mass Effect 3 flipped this by also including a "gaming" mode where it automates the dialogue options for you, letting the player get back to the combat!) 

No, really, the failure of Beyond: Two Souls is that the story is poor. It is a string of emotional set-pieces; some of of them exciting, some of them sad, but not even building to a climax (the last CIA mission in the game, for instance, is basically the easiest one. And arguably has the least stakes and certainly the least pay-off.)

Much less does it get anywhere. Jodie claims in the end-game dialogue that she needed peace and quiet to get her head together...but she had that chance at mid-game, the "Navaho" chapter, and she made the same claim then as well! The CIA keeps building bigger and bigger condensers despite the things ending in larger and larger body-counts, and Jodie keeps bailing them out of their mistakes despite being promptly betrayed for her trust yet again. You could stop the game at "Condenser" (about a quarter of the way in) and you'd have the same story arc and the same sense of completion.

In any case.

It is interactivity I want to talk about, and as such, it falls about in the middle. The problem with QTE events, like the old Dragon's Lair (and really not improved since) is that they replace playing the game with playing Simon Says or be forced back to a previous scene to try again.

Game designers reach for them because they've imagined some wonderful cinematic moment -- which they don't dare let the player attempt because they'd just screw it up -- but by making it a QTE they've ensure that instead of watching the carefully choreographed action, most of the player's attention will be on staring at the screen waiting for the button prompt.

In other games, the QTE are mostly replaced by Action Prompts, where instead of playing "name the button" there's a consistent control which is always used, allowing you to instinctively react with a dodge roll or parry or whatever. For something like Hogwart's Legacy you hardly need the button prompts to know what to do or when to do it.

(This is the tutorial for protego. After this, only the "spidey sense" pops up -- and paying attention to that is only necessary if you want to do the "perfect protego" that bounces a spell back at your enemy. Otherwise it is just like doing a dodge roll -- watch the enemy and when they do a wand gesture...duck.)

Beyond: Two Souls falls between these, as the lure of the QTE proved too much; to gamify the experience, the buttons are swapped around, meaning any instincts you do develop just get in the way. At least they are semi real-time, and not cutscenes that go on so long you forget you might need to press a button soon.

***

All of this, however, is just interactivity. Your core engagement with a game is, well, playing the game. Although in a game like Mass Effect you can make significant choices that influence game events two games later, you make these through choosing a line of dialogue.

In Skyrim you can make an early-game choice on whether you align with Empire or Stormcloak -- but you make it by turning left or right (and under conditions where it is not at all clear you are making a choice at all). 

The point being, the core gameplay skills, the thing you worked at all game to become better at, has nothing to do with these choices. Okay, here's an even more clear example:

In Horizon: Forbidden West you gain renown over defeating Regalla's champion at the ambush of the Embassy. Random Tenach will recognize you the moment you walk into their village (apparently you are the only ginger in California) and they are all impressed about that fight.

But the only gameplay involved was to win the fight. Which you have to do to continue the game anyhow. The thing of it is, even at this early stage of the game Aloy has a lot of options. She could snipe at him from cover, she could do a close-up beat-down with the spear. She could take over a machine and let it trample him! The fight could be a hard-won victory or a curb-stomp.

None of this matters. Not a one of those random villagers says "...and you did it face-to-face like a true warrior" or "...even if you did have to use booby-traps."

For all the options the game gives you, none of the Ancestor-obsessed Quen ever notice that you are dressed like Elizabeth Sobek (if you chose that outfit). None of the proud Tenach notice when you've started collecting your own tribal tattoos (okay...you only get face paint. But still!)

Out of a whole bunch of games, only Skyrim comes to mind as one where random passers-by will notice the difference between you being a khajit wearing leather armor, or a Nord in head-to-toe shimmering magically-enhanced ebony armor. And the muggers won't notice, thinking you are an easy mark either way.

But this is still a sideline. The closest I can think of a game noticing how you play the game is that, if you blow stealth (or never attempt it) your companion NPC (in more than one game) might say, "I guess we're doing it the noisy way, then."

Take another situation that comes up quite often. Big fight against an important character. You "win" via normal game mechanics. Enter a cut scene where somehow, despite taking a nuke to the face, the guy is lying on the floor saying "I give up."

At which point you have a dialogue wheel on whether to kill them forgive them or whatever.

Okay, sure, I can accept this for important characters and important choices. You want to savor it, it wants to be dramatized properly. So you really do have to do it out of "melee time."

But then you get to something like Skyrim's "yield" mechanics. Or complete lack of mechanics. Some enemies will stop fighting and throw down their weapons. Same for Fallout 4 (same engine, after all). So can you tell them to run, can you take them prisoner, can you order them to give up their loot?

No. You can wait for them to recover enough health points to...try and kill you again. (Your followers are smarter than that; they simply ignore the fake surrender).

One of the few places I can think of where how you play the combat matters is when there is a strong stealth component. And even there it is rare to go as far as some entries in the Metal Gear series, where the people you killed (instead of stealthing your way past) return as ghosts to torment you.

In Beyond: Two Souls if you chose (as Aiden) to kill the guard in the Embassy scene (not to be confused with Forbidden West's Embassy scene!) Jodie will have a horrified reaction, yelling "You didn't have to kill him!" (In a different sequence, if you let Aiden take bloody revenge on Jodie's tormenters at the party scene...she's wearing goth clothing in the next scene chronologically.)

That's about the extent of it for most games. You can't change the game by stealthing...or by using flame preferentially to roast your assailants alive. Nobody notices if you are a stealth archer...or have the subtlety of Bulldog Drummond.

And more than that. Whether you fought well or didn't fight well, it doesn't open up significant story options. In many games, that gameplay loop is hermetic. Win tougher fights, earn better weapons. The story progresses regardless. 

It is tempting to think of the problem as one of combat. There are games where combat is not the most-used skill, and skillfully moving through dialogue trees is what both progresses you through the story and earns you different stories. 

And you can absolutely put your stamp on the game experience if it isn't primarily a combat game.

As I've said before, combat is the go-to because for the cost of basic enemy AI and some variety of weapons, you get a semi-emergent behavior; you get variety that allows endless hours of play that don't feel all the same. When you have to craft every line of dialogue, every button prompt, it is hard for a game to provide that same length of play. And like it or not, playable time is one of the measures of value for a game.

It gets worse, though. Combat works because it is a "twitch" activity. And... yeah, I'm not harping, it is just that this is such a good example for some of my points. And also inspired my thinking. Anyhow, Beyond: Two Souls comes close to failing this because the things that are timed are the things that really shouldn't be timed (like dialogue choices) and the things that are timed, aren't timed in the way that makes them satisfying.

THIS is not combat.

THIS is.

You have events unfolding in real time but more importantly you have options which you can access instinctively. Finishing a QTE sequence can be tough and can be annoying, but you never get that sense of control in having made a choice about what action to take and carrying it out successfully (or not).

***

Is there a way a game can tie this satisfying and common aspect of games to the advancement of story? To things that change your personal experience and the world your character inhabits?

Or is it already too much of a stretch goal asking developers to spend time in design and testing on paths in a game a significant number of players will never encounter? That's like a bakery choosing to make six highly decorated cakes for every one that is actually sold.

But I don't think it is a stretch goal for game to react more to your actions outside the sometimes extremely small number of scripted branches. On the one side, we have Skyrim guards noticing if you have skill in magic, and even cautioning you if you have a flaming weapon out. On the other side, we have AAA games spending a tremendous amount of time on not-always-well-integrated collectibles and achievements and cosmetics.

Go back to that facepaint. In Forbidden West, you need to complete certain quests to unlock certain patterns, collect the pigments from various hard-to-reach locations, then bring both to the merchants in some towns who will apply them.

And at the end...Aloy looks different. At least this is a game with fully animated dialogue scenes so you get to SEE Aloy's face in-game.

After all of this, was it really a bridge too far to have a passing stranger recognize Seeker colors and mention it?

It didn't stick the landing

Finished Beyond: Two Souls. 

Young writers will ask if they should finish their book before they talk to a publisher. Yes, they do. And that's not just because publisher or agent wants to be sure you can finish the length of a book. There's more to it than that. They want to know if all those pages, all those chapters and scenes, all those character and descriptions and bits of action, were actually working towards a satisfying finish.

We're talking, basically, the difference between a story, and a string of incidents.

That's my final review, really. Some of the incidents are fun. But in the end, they don't string together. Through the first two-thirds of the game you feel that everything that is going on is helping to build the final crisis and resolution. All the incidents that the game highlights for you (that is, has you play) feel like they are going to eventually contribute to the story.

And it isn't even a fault of the non-chronological story-telling. The actions really don't make a difference. There are twenty-four potential endings (!) but the differences between them are largely who is still around to share it with you.

You never get a chance to throw off the yoke of your CIA handlers, whether to betray them, run, agree with them, or go on a rampage of revenge killing everything in sight with your powers. But looking back on the entire chronology, now that you've seen all the pieces of it, those pieces don't connect. From the perspective you finally gain at the end of the game, Jodie runs from the CIA, goes back to work for them, runs from them, goes back to work for them (despite the larger and larger betrayals!) And the same for Ryan. No matter how terrible he behaves and how cold you are in response, a few scenes down the road the game is telling you Jodie is in love with him again.

Oh, and those "choices?" You don't really get choices. What you largely get is the failure to pull off a QTE. Even the dialogue choices are only barely choices. Where most game pause on a dialogue wheel or tree, this game flashes several dialogue options at you and if you don't select one within about half a second, it defaults to one and goes on without your input.

It isn't a game. It's a walking simulator. Or maybe call it a karate-chopping simulator. Making you press three different buttons just to climb through a window doesn't make you an active participant in a choice to climb through the window.

Still, even that would be -- might be -- acceptable if the story you got at the end held together. In the end, you do finally find out what Aiden is (and the answer is one that flies in the face of not just how you probably played him, but several things the game has him do). But as I said, there isn't any great resolution. You can't even finish off by dying...you can indeed chose to cross over, but that just means you settle down to life after death instead of life with...oh, how about the CIA agent who lied to you on multiple occasions, and let's not even talk about the dinner scene!

I'm not unhappy I played it. But I'm glad I got it on sale.

Jodie, Jodie, Jodie

For a bit there I was so tired of everything I couldn't even get up the interest to play games. At least that has changed.

I've been playing Beyond: Two Souls which isn't really a shooter but is a little more active than a visual novel. Just call it highly story-oriented. You can make critical choices, but only the ones at the very end change the game radically. Whether you sob quietly or go full Carrie at the party, for instance, might get brought up in dialogue at some point but doesn't change anything otherwise.

Oh, yeah. You are basically playing Elliot Page with psychic powers. Sort of psychic powers. Actually, this is your link to the entity Aiden, which you also "play," but he/it/they get no dialogue choices.

As an aside, playing a character in a game is always a dual-mind thing. This game makes it more so because we don't really know what Aiden is or why he does the things he does. We have Jodie's opinions -- but those are expressed to third parties and are (you guessed it!) a dialogue choice anyhow! And through the game Aiden can learn things (by overhearing conversations Jodie wasn't there for) that may or may not eventually get communicated to Jodie.

Plus the game is played out of chronological sequence. It sounds like a massive mind screw, but it is actually quite straight-forward.

The controls, on the other hand...

Take the crazy left foot, right hand stuff from the early Assassin's Creed. Combine it with the insane camera of Nier Automata. Re-invent everything, from QTEs to shooting, then make everything an action. In about the middle of the game there's a romantic dinner and you can if you choose that path make chicken curry......using mouse and control keys to chop the vegetables one by one! Hell, to scramble through a window takes four button presses of three different buttons!

(And the PC port shares with so many games a seeming complete lack of any standard for how to represent the controls. I get it; on the controller it would be square or cross or whatever...but us poor mouse-and-keyboard players get shown a circle with a line drawn through it and really struggling to figure out what the game wants us to do.)

Example of the control scheme. Normal interaction for a game is, when you get close you get a floating "E" or whatever the interact button is. You press that "E" or square or whatever, and you do the thing (open a door, pick up a fire extinguisher, you know the drill). In this game, you maneuver close enough to allow you to interact (words alone can not describe the sheer hell of navigating a room in this game) then, holding down a mouse button flick the mouse in the direction of the floating interact dot. Then keep holding until the animation completes. Then release, so you can click again to actually do the (like chopping vegetables or climbing over a low fence).

After so many games developing instincts to dodge or parry (dodge or protego!) this one requires you wait for Jodie to choose what she is going to do, start the movement, then you hold down the mouse button and move the mouse (at the right speed of course -- and the game is very sensitive about what the right speed is) in the screen direction that some part of the action is moving. So if you are in three-quarter view and Jodie is doing a bent-knee kick, good freaking luck figuring out which direction you are supposed to be moving.

There's a reason the forums are full of people crying for help on how to get through the CIA Training Sequence.

At least that one, they force you to get up off the floor and try again until you finally get it right. Everywhere else in the game -- almost refreshingly! -- these QTE-like events have no retake. You never die failing to dodge a knife and have to replay the sequence. Well, not exactly. You fail the QTE, you get stabbed, you go to a side-path where now you are bleeding out and have to deal with that, and when you get to the end of that sequence you get a little scorecard telling you "96% of players can dodge a hell of a lot better than you can."

Okay, it doesn't snark at you. Is still...different. On the whole, though, I like it. For two reasons. First is that having to re-take the damned QTE -- and watch Lara Croft impale herself throat-first on a spike trap once again -- isn't a lot of fun.

The other reason is that this became a lot like my "damaged Shepard" Mass Effect run. Jodie gets a hard time of it anyhow, getting beat up, homeless (and both at the same time) and having her and her three whole weeks of CIA training struggling just to survive. (Okay, seriously, it was longer than that. Fortunately you didn't have to play through all of it)  Not breezing through with a James Bond quip, but getting bruised and stabbed and not only that, not always succeeding at trying to save the people she tries to save.

***

And speaking of being a monster: Finally read a review that explained why people like the Murderbot Diaries. Given the gloss I gave to Beyond: Two Souls above, call this a high-functioning autistic with a built-in machinegun trying to find purpose in a corporate dystopia.

And it is funny and heartwarming. Plus various violent interactions. And you really do have to read it to get why people like it.

SecUnit is also my go-to now for Untrustworthy Narrator. Not that you ever take anything it says at face value. 

It doesn't, either.

Neon sign flickering

There's another alternative for my Tiki protagonist.

Basically, the narrow orange slice of intersection between Tiki and pulp SF is mostly unexplored. If there is a bridge, though, it passes through Pulp Noir.

And both Pulp Noir and Tiki seem to lean towards that particular sort of cynical but good-hearted, knight in tarnished armor, older man. Tiki is a drinking culture of people who have made a comfortable enough middle class to need it...and to long of a beach bum existence, relaxing in a lounge chair staring out to see with the ice slowly melting in their drink.

Which is Travis McGee and maybe that's what led me to the connection. On the other side, you could perhaps name Commodore Grimes but that's the thing; the SF pulp may have its share of cynical heroes but the trend is strong towards heroes in the prime of their lives.

(Which, well, what Travis was until he ran out of primary colors.)

Thing of it is, the beach bum persona, or the equivalent in the slightly-over-the-hill merchant captain, someone with a failed Navy career, a messy divorce and a long flirtation with demon rum in his background, is also a fun character to throw into the kind of situations I envisioned. When he gets told by aggressively ambitious middle-management that he is "One of us" and will happily throw his quaint native friends under the space-bus to make a tidy profit of his own, he will be more than a little bemused.

And when said locals start seeing him as a hero he is equally non-plussed. So it works. And it also would give me a voice that could interrogate colonialism and racism not through waving the representation card but through being a flawed human being who can sympathize but also understand just how short his sympathies and his understanding falls. 

Jolly Wizard

Still not writing. Found a heart for the Tiki book, though. It fits all the needs; it interests me, it offers some good challenges in story-telling, it connects to the world and theme in a way that integrates all three legs of this tripod. (Character, world, plot, that is.)

But it is also something I am probably not the right writer for.

When I dreamed up my protagonist, Rick was clearly an everyman, a stock hero protagonist type (not to be confused with Hiro Protagonist from Snowcrash). I toyed with the idea of making him protean; that others would read things on to him. Like the protagonist of a Bethesda game, who every single faction views as the perfect representative of all their faction stands for. Generally on first meeting.

There's this concept of the blank slate character, the Audience Surrogate. It is argued in game circles now but it goes back to fiction and the theory is that specifying as little as possible makes it easier for the reader to project themselves onto that character. This also became a go-to argument for why, somehow, the hero always ended up looking the same.

I don't believe it worked out like that in practice. I think the cis white make protagonist survives not because he represents a majority audience but because he is comfortably normal. He fades into the background like the word "said."

(Not a place for that lecture, but inexperienced writers reach for screamed, shrilled, cried, hooted, hissed until their dialogue sounds like it is happening at a zoo. Just use "said." It vanishes, like "a" or "the.")

In fact, so powerful is this default (so invisible, rather) I think it is actually bad advice to write your female, gay, asian, whatever character without keeping in mind they live in a world that probably notices -- one that also makes assumptions about the prevalence of cis white male as the "average human." (Just talk to a woman about the design of seat belts.)

If you leave that interaction out, you risk, like the old joke about the surgeon who can't operate on their own son, the brain of the reader going back to the default.

He's even a ginger on this one!

You also leave out story potential, and this is why I'm in that position. Tiki is already in a potentially uncomfortable place with exoticism, cultural appropriations and colonial legacy. I knew this going into it. And I knew that because of how I was structuring the nove,l and some of the stories I was trying to tell in it, my ISO900 Standard Protagonist (Space Opera) was going to include the standard Mighty Whitey as part of the package (along with the "aw shucks" heroism and the two-fisted approach to problem-solving).

That's not the only reason I want not to do that. It's not just white guilt. Primarily, it is because this uneasy relationship -- between the origins of tiki and the consumerist paradise being built with that as an element -- is the potential theme I am looking at to drive the story. And it becomes theme, world-building, and conflict when it is also character.

If Rick isn't white, he can personally interrogate these conflicts. He can already be involved with some of the plots without needing to drop in with his TARDIS and decide to get involved out of the plain goodness of his heart or just because he's having a boring day.

And it presents a more interesting version of that protean conceit, as well; the internal culture conflict, with various factions declaring him "one of them," even to the extent he feels distinctly uncomfortable pressed into that role.

Of course there I am, adding masks and role play into a book again. One that already has tropes to contend with. I'm re-inventing all the things that were giving me trouble with the Athena Fox stories.