Login
Illustration by Na Kim.
As I was going to enter college that fall my parents felt that I should build myself up at a summer camp of some sort. They sent me down to a place in the Ozarks on a beautiful lake. It was called a camp but it was not just for boys. It was for both sexes and all ages. It was a rustic, comfortable place. But I was disappointed to find that most of the young people went to another camp several miles down the lake toward the dam. I spent a great deal of time by myself that summer, which is hardly good for a boy of seventeen.
It was a dry summer. There were very few days of rain. But the Ozark country with its gentle green hills and clear lakes and rivers did not turn ugly and brown as most countries do in seasons of drought. The willows along the lake remained translucently green, while the hillside forests, toward the end of July, began to look as though they had been splashed with purple, red, and amber wine. Their deepening colors did not suggest dryness nor stoppage of life. They looked, rather, like a flaming excess, a bursting opulence of life. And the air, when you drove through the country in an open car, was faintly flavored with wine, for the grapes grew plentifully that season. While the cornfields yellowed and languished, the purple grapes fairly swarmed from their vines, as though they had formed some secret treaty with nature or dug into some hidden reservoir of subterranean life, and the lean hill-folk piled them into large white baskets and stood along the sunny roads and highways crying, “Grapes, grapes, grapes,” so that your ears as well as your eyes and nostrils and mouth were filled with them, until it seemed that the whole body and soul of the country was somehow translated into this vast efflorescence of sweet purple fruit.
Perhaps it was the intoxicating effect of the wine-flavored air, perhaps it was only the novelty of being so much by myself, but I fell that summer into a sort of enchantment, a sort of moody drunkenness, that troubled and frightened me more than a little.
I had led an active boy’s life. I had always been the typical young extrovert, delighting in games and the companionship of other boys, having little time for reading and abstract thinking, having little time for looking inward upon the mystery of myself, and so this dry summer on the beautiful lake, as I fell slowly into the habit of deep introspection, brooding and dreaming about myself and life and the meaning of things, I felt as though I were waking up from a long dream or sinking into one. I was lonely and frightened and curiously content.
It became my custom that summer to go down to the lake by myself right after breakfast, unmoor a rowboat or a canoe from the rickety grey wharf, and row or paddle out to the center of the lake and then lie down in the boat’s bottom, take off all clothes but my swimming trunks, and let the slow current carry me along under the golden-burning sun while my consciousness surrendered itself, like the boat, to a leisurely tide of reveries and dreams.
Sometimes I would fall asleep while I drifted. I would awake to find myself in an unfamiliar country. I had drifted several miles from the camp, perhaps, and the sun had climbed to its zenith while I slept. The lake had narrowed or widened, or perhaps I had drifted in close to shore and directly beside me was a wet wall of grey rock from which obtruded strange ferns and flowers, or over my head was a fantastic, green-gold, feathery dome of willow branches, overshadowing myself and my stranded vessel with barely a motion, barely a whisper, in the windless noon.
Always beyond me, further down the lake, were the open fields of grapes, and however still the air was, it always held faintly the flavor of wine.
I would lie there in the bottom of the boat and continue to stare at what my eyes had opened upon, never turning my head or moving my body for fear of breaking the spell. I would imagine that I had actually drifted into some unknown place while I slept, some mythical kingdom, an Avalon or something, in which all kinds of things could happen and usually did.
It was hard to shake myself out of these dreams. It was hard to turn my eyes—staring as though hypnotized at the wet wall of grey rock or the dazzling dome of sunlit willows—back to the olive-green expanse of the lake. I would feel strangely dull inside and fagged out when I finally roused myself. It was not merely the drowsiness that you feel after a long midday sleep. It was more like the aftereffects of a powerful drug. Sometimes I would feel so weak that it would be hard for me to row or paddle back against the current. Still I would never know exactly what had gone on inside me during the dream or how long it had lasted, or why, in heaven’s name, I behaved like this! Was I losing my mind?
As summer slipped by the population of the little camp increased. Each weekend a new crowd or two would drive down from Saint Louis or Kansas City or still further away. When I first arrived, early in June, the place had seemed deserted and I had felt bitterly lonely and wished that some people, any kind of people, would come. But now I had changed. I no longer felt a thrill of anticipation when a new group or family arrived at the camp, wondering each time how this bunch would turn out, observing with pleasure their equipment for sports, but disappointed, usually, because most of them were either too young or too old. Now the sight of a dust-covered car rolling up the camp drive with tennis racquets and fishing rods, and eager faces protruding from the windows, faces smiling and begging to be accepted into this place and its life, gave me no pleasure, but filled me instead with a vague annoyance. I was becoming like a grumpy old man who wanted nothing so much as a quiet place to sleep, only it was not to sleep that I wanted, but to dream.
Then I began to be really frightened of myself. I quit going out alone on the lake. I made friends with a young professor who was spending his vacation at the camp. I played tennis and learned contract bridge with some young married couples. I tried not to think of the sun on the lake and on my naked skin and the faint, delicious fragrance of the purple grapes.
Toward the end of the summer I met a young girl. I did not think her especially attractive. She did not seem either pretty or homely. Perhaps she was really beautiful but I was then too young to find beauty in anything but the outlines of a woman’s face and figure. She was considerably older than I, she was about twenty-five, and I could see that she was lonely, terribly lonely, and was wanting with all her heart to get close to somebody, just as I was wanting to slip away, to float alone on the lake.
The young professor had loaned me some books. He had loaned me a book by Nietzsche which I found especially disturbing.
Was it possible, I asked myself, that all things could be so useless and indefinite as Nietzsche made them look? I shrugged my shoulders, after a while, remembering the sunlight on my body and on the lake, and the mysteriously suggestive fragrance of the grapes. Such colossal doubt, I thought to myself, was more or less irrelevant to life after all!
I was reading this book one evening on the porch of the main cabin, overlooking the lake, and I was feeling particularly rebellious against its doctrines, when the girl came onto the porch and seated herself in the wicker chair next to mine. Without turning my eyes from the book I knew she was looking at me, maybe wondering whether to speak. She had looked at me before. She had been down at the camp for about two weeks. I had only been vaguely aware of her presence, since she was not attractive to my unawakened senses and was easily seven or eight years older than I. But I looked old for my age that summer. I was tall and had acquired a small mustache along with my unusually serious and reflective manner.
When the light became too dim for reading I laid the book across my knees and glanced cautiously at the girl’s profile. I was suddenly stabbed with pity. A look of hopelessness had settled over her face. She was not looking at the sunset or the lake or anything visible from the cabin porch, but her eyes were wide open.
She is a little stenographer from Saint Louis or Kansas City who has come down here to meet some young people and have a good time, maybe fall in love and get married at last, and she has found only two young men, myself and the goggle-eyed professor who hates the sight of a skirt, and here I sit reading Nietzsche and considering the abstract problems of life and wishing only to be left by myself …
It was only a minute or two since I had laid down my book but I had considered the girl since then with such intentness and such a feeling of peculiar clairvoyance that it seemed to me I had known her already for quite a long time. I started talking to her. I was pleased to see the hopeless look drop away from her face. It became quite animated. She started rocking in the chair, then pulled it closer to mine, and soon we were chattering together like intimate friends.
“There’s a dance at Branson tonight,” the girl suddenly remarked, “would you like to take me?”
Surely if I had thought twice I would have refused. Before I went to college my legs behaved like stilts whenever I started to dance and I hadn’t the faintest notion of how to move myself around to music.
But my head was light from reading too much and the girl’s manner was peculiarly importunate. Before I knew it I had accepted the suggestion and we had started to Branson. This little hill town was the location of a popular summer resort; it was a mile or two down the lake from our camp. We walked over, along by the lake and hills, and all the way we talked with a strange excitement. Maybe I had been terribly lonely, too, without knowing it, and had only wanted someone to break the ice. Anyway, in the twilight along by the lake, the girl no longer seemed rather too old for me or too heavy. I noticed something Gypsy-like in her appearance, something wise and significant in her dark eyes and large, aquiline nose, and full, over-red lips. I noticed the deep swell of her breasts, and when she walked a little ahead, the swaying strength of her hips. I had a dizzy feeling of wanting to get close against her and be enveloped in that warmth which she seemed to possess.
“Do you like wine?” she asked me as we started across the bridge.
I admitted that I had never tried it. The summer before, when my grandfather took me to Europe, I had drunk some crème de menthe as soon as the bar opened, a few miles out at sea, and had become violently seasick immediately afterwards. I had disliked the smell of alcohol ever since.
“But this will be different,” she said. “Do you smell those grapes?”
We paused in the middle of the bridge and sure enough the wind from down the lake carried to us the grapes’ elusive fragrances.
“It’s delicious!” I cried.
“I know a place, an old hillbilly’s cabin near the town, where we can stop and get some swell grape wine,” she went on, “and it will make us feel like dancing our feet off!”
Laughing, she caught hold of my arm and we started running along the road. Her black hair blew back from her face and in her running figure, throat arched and deep bosom swaying, there was something excitingly pagan.
“You are beautiful,” I heard myself saying in a husky voice. “You’re like an ancient goddess, or a nymph, or a …”
She squeezed my arm. “You’re funny!” she said.
The hillbilly’s cabin was a little frame house on the road to town. In the yard a white goat was munching the grass. An old woman sat on the wooden steps with her hands folded in her lap. She got up slowly as we approached. Wordlessly she held the door open and we slipped in. These were the days before repeal. I felt quite adventurous, sitting down at the rickety old table with its worn checkered oilcloth and kerosene lamp, while the old man in overalls and the witch-like old woman pulled bottles out of a hidden barrel, opened them with a loud popping sound, and poured the sparkling purple stuff into cold tin cups for us to drink.
At first it seemed rather bitter. But there was not the alcoholic taste that I had feared. So I ordered a second cup and a third. The girl across from me drank slowly. She kept glancing at me in a calculating way, as though she were trying to surmise my age or other potentialities, as she had looked at me on the porch and several times before that, but I found myself no longer annoyed by that look. It pleased me, in fact, more than a little. Here was I, drinking wine with what was obviously a woman of the world, a Gypsy-like girl no longer very young, with a look of strange wisdom in the back of her eyes.
Who knows what may happen tonight? The possibilities began to frighten me a little.
I leaned far back in my chair, tilting against the stovepipe, and returned her smile in a manner that was supposed to be replete with sophisticated suggestion. We looked at each other for some time that way, as though with an understanding too deep for words. Slowly the girl lifted her eyebrows, then narrowed her eyes till they were two slits of luminous black. Her heavy, painted lips fell slightly open, and she, too, relaxed in her chair, as though a question had been asked and a satisfactory answer been given. It almost seemed that I could hear her purring under her breath, contentedly, like a cat.
“I have been so lonely at the camp,” she murmured, “that it hasn’t seemed like a real vacation until tonight.”
She lifted the cup with both hands but instead of drinking she breathed its fragrance deeply. She smiled slightly over the brim of the cup:
“It’s sort of bittersweet, isn’t it?” she said softly. “It always makes me feel like laughing or crying or something.”
When we left the cabin the white goat in the yard looked to me like a fantastic horned monster. The dusty road rocked under my feet. Everything seemed quite unreasonably amusing. Laughing loudly, I caught the girl’s arm, and she, more than returning my pressure, laughed with me, but all the while kept glancing speculatively up at my face.
“Are you sure you aren’t too tight to dance?” she asked. Her voice seemed absurdly serious.
“Too tight!” I screamed. “Why, I’ve never been so loose in all my life!”
I was startled by the hysterical sound of my voice, almost like a girl’s. I staggered against the dark young woman and she put a sustaining arm around my back. It seemed awfully silly. She was nearly a foot shorter than I, and here she was holding me up.
“Leave me alone,” I told her severely. “I can walk all right by myself!”
She laughed a little. “How old are you?” she asked abruptly.
“Nineteen,” I lied.
“Really? I didn’t know you were quite so young as that,” she said. For a while afterwards she seemed quieter and more distant. Then we came into Branson. There were clusters of glazed lamps along the street. There were bright drugstores and restaurants and a picture show with a shiny tin portico and gaudy placards. Everywhere there were gay holiday crowds in white linens and flannels and colorful sweaters. Down by the lake the band was playing noisily and everyone was flocking in that direction.
Then she seemed to come alive again. She caught my arm.
“I’m crazy to dance!” she said. “It seems like my vacation is just beginning!”
The dance hall was a long log building, open except for screens, and lighted by Japanese lanterns that swayed constantly in the wind. My physical drunkenness left as soon as we stepped on the floor. For the first time I found that I could move myself to music. My feet slid effortlessly along the wax floor and the girl’s body was suppliant to mine. It was more than suppliant. I caught her tighter and tighter against me. The warmth of her body surged through my linen suit. Her breath was damp against my throat. Her fingers caught at my shoulder. She seemed to be asking for an even closer embrace than I could give. Then I experienced something that I had never before experienced with a girl. I felt ashamed and tried to loosen my hold. But to my amazement she only clung tighter. She pressed her lips against my throat and clung as though she were drunk, drunker than I had been on the moonlit road. Her feet became tangled with mine, her body drooped, and I seemed to be dragging her along the floor. My warm feeling passed. I looked around at the strange faces surrounding the floor. It seemed that everyone was staring at us. I stopped abruptly at the edge of the floor.
“Let’s go out for a while,” I said, without looking at her.
She must have misunderstood my averted face, the strained quality of my voice. She repeated the words like an echo, “Let’s go out for a while.”
We went down the wooden steps from the dance hall and down the wooden walk to the beach.
Here it was all smooth sand, a pale silver in the moonlight, stretching for a mile or two up and down the lake. The wind was blowing with a new coolness that hinted of rain, although the clouds were still scattered.
The girl caught my arm and stopped for a moment at the end of the wooden walk.
“Do you smell the grapes?” she asked.
I shuddered slightly. I had drunk too much of the wine. The intoxication was passing and the taste in my mouth was cloyingly sweet.
“Where are you going?” I called to the girl.
Laughing wildly, she had started running along the sand.
After a while we both looked around. We discovered that the amusement resort and even the lights of the town had disappeared. There was only the moon and the stars and the wide silence of the lake and the sand crunching under our feet. I felt like an inexperienced swimmer who finds himself suddenly beyond his depth. But the girl’s face was fairly shining with some inner violence. She fell down on the sand and pressed her hands against it and swept them out like a swimmer, again and again. It seemed to me that she was moaning a little, deep in her throat, or purring again like a cat. I was tempted to slip away from her. All my lightness and exuberance were gone. I didn’t feel like awaiting the development of that which seemed to be possessing the girl. I was no longer flattered or stirred. She didn’t seem to be aware of me, for the moment, but only of something inside of herself, a drunken feeling, that made her rub her hands over the sand in a gesture that seemed to me vaguely obscene.
It may have been that I was fascinated, it may have been that I was frightened or repelled. My emotions were cloaked in a dullness that made them for a long time afterwards hard to describe. At any rate, I found it impossible to leave her there. My feet were rooted in the silver sand. I stood above her, breathing the cloying sweetness of grapes on the wind, and waiting for the girl’s private ecstasy to pass.
At length she lifted her head, from where she was stooping low upon the sand, swept her hair back with one hand and extended toward me the other. Dizzily I fell down beside her and somehow or other we were kissing and her tongue had slid between my lips. All the while, though my actions were those of a male possessed by passion, my mind was standing above her with a dull revulsion. Her Gypsy-like darkness, the heaviness of her form, the black wisdom of her eyes were now laid bare of secrets. I knew why she was lonely, why she said she had been so terribly lonely until tonight. For all my manly aspirations, I couldn’t help fearing the girl. Catching at my shoulders, she fell back on the sand. She was breathing heavily and her breath smelled of wine.
“Let’s go back to the dance,” I muttered.
“No, I’m tired of the dance,” she said. “Why do you act so funny? Don’t you like me? Am I ugly or something?”
Good God, what is wrong with you? I said to myself. You know what she wants! You aren’t a kid anymore!
But I couldn’t endure the winey sweetness of her breath. I turned my face away and got up from the sand.
“Let’s go swimming!” I suggested wildly.
“All right!” she agreed.
Too late I realized that we had no suits for swimming. The girl was already tearing the clothes from her body. She plunged quite naked into the lake. I could only do likewise. Numbly I removed my clothes and followed her. The cool of the lake broke through the dream-like numbness of my body and mind. I felt chilled and awakened. For a while my exuberance of the earlier evening returned. We swam and played in the water like children. I didn’t think of her nakedness nor of mine. I swam far out and then swam in again. When I climbed out on the sand I was exhausted and lay down and looked at the starry sky, almost forgetting the girl and what had happened between us a few minutes before.
The wind from the lake turned colder. I began to shake uncontrollably. The girl was still splashing and swimming in the water, crying out as though she had gone quite mad. I rose from the beach and started to get my clothes. But then she dashed out of the water.
“You’re still wet!” she cried. “Why do you act so funny?”
Weakly I sank down again on the sand. The girl was laughing at me. She ran over to the willow where she had hung her clothes. She came back with the little white coat that she had carried to the dance.
“Here!” she said. “This will keep us both warm!”
Staring up at this garment that whipped above me like a white ghost in the wind from the lake, observing its length and its breadth and even its thickness, I slowly understood her words, what they meant, what they could only mean. I saw that she was smiling in the moonlight. Her black hair blew away from her face. She stood between me and the wind and I breathed the warmth of her body mingled with the cloying sweetness of the grapes. With a sudden fury I caught at her white legs. I pulled her down in the sand. The coat was forgotten, and the cold wind and the lake, and I scarcely knew whether I hated or loved.
It rained the next morning, starting quite early, before breakfast, and continuing till noon. I didn’t get up. I lay all morning on my bed in the small log cabin, feeling exhausted and rather ill. I looked out at the grey rain and listened to the grey sound of it on the roof. When I finally came out I found that the Springfield bus had come and gone. The girl’s vacation was over and for several hours she had been on her way back to her job in a Kansas City life insurance office. I was relieved.
By noon the rain had dwindled away. The wind rose up again, the clouds were scattered like foam. The grey lake was turning green beneath a blazing sun. But in the rain-freshened air there was already the tonic coolness of the coming fall.
After dinner I stood facing the lake, breathing deep, and suddenly there rushed in upon me the old longing to escape from the camp and the restless gaiety of its population and to be by myself on the lake. I ran back to the cabin and put on my swimming trunks. I took a pair of oars from the manager’s office and sprinted down to the rickety wharf. I felt the eyes of the porch loungers following me down, the eyes of new young girls and young men who had arrived at the camp that morning, and I felt proud of myself, proud of my deeply bronzed skin and my well-conditioned body, but most of all, proud of my freedom, my loneliness that asked only to be left alone. It seemed to me that only I and the lake belonged here; I and the lake and the sun. The others were presumptuous intruders. These weekenders with their pale skins and slow muscles and feverish friendliness could never belong in this country, could never share in my mystical companionship with the lake and the hills and the sun.
The girl was gone. They would go, too.
Without glancing back I loosened one of the boats from the wharf and rowed out to the center of the lake. I lay down in the bottom of the boat and surrendered myself to the leisurely tide of dreams.
But there was something wrong. Maybe it was the unusual coolness of the wind, the lightness of the rain-freshened air, the barely perceptible decline of summer. But I was restless. I turned from one side to the other. The hard ridges in the bottom of the boat irritated my skin. The sun wasn’t warm enough, the wind was too cool.
Swiftly the boat moved down between the hills. The rain-swell on creeks had made the current strong that morning. The wind was bearing from up the lake. The boat moved swiftly, easily, as if carried by sails. The hills dwindled, the bare cliffs fell away, the lake widened and widened till finally I found myself in an open country. On either side were the vast fields of grapes, grapes, grapes! And though the boat drifted now in the very center of the wide lake, their odor came toward me stronger and sweeter every moment till it seemed that my mouth was filled with their purple wine and my whole body suffused with their warmth.
I lay in the bottom of the boat, twisting and groaning aloud, crying with the terrible loneliness of the flesh, remembering the lips of the girl against my lips, remembering the warmth of her body, remembering the Gypsy-darkness of her face, the wildness of her hair and eyes, and most of all, the passionate sweetness of her embrace, dark and sweet, almost cloyingly sweet, like the rich, purple fragrance of the grapes.
In a sort of terror I grasped the oars and started rowing furiously back to the camp. I no longer wanted to be alone. I had never drifted so far as the grape fields nor breathed their purple haunting sweetness so deeply before. Now I wanted to return to the camp and its people. I wanted to feel them moving closely and warmly around me. I wanted to hear their loud voices and feel the strong pressure of their hands. I wanted to lose myself among them.
The story will be published in Williams’s collection The Caterpillar Dogs and Other Early Stories, forthcoming from New Directions in April.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
My last development diary entry looked at the origins of Babyface, my submission to the 2020 Interactive Fiction competition (IFComp). This dev diary entry looks at one of the first things reviewers say about Babyface: that it’s mostly linear. Usually this comes as a simple description of the game’s format, rather than a criticism. Because I did expect people to criticize the game for having such a linear-driven narrative. Babyface lacks some of the hallmarks of interactive fiction. There are no puzzles you can solve. And there are no choices that change the outcome of the game. This lack of choices is absolutely deliberate. So now I want to talk about my approach to the question of agency and choice (or lack thereof) in Babyface.
Babyface is categorized as “choice-based” on the IFComp list of entries. But I only selected “choice-based” as the category because Babyface clearly doesn’t fit the other available category, parser-based. Both categories carry with them a set of associations:
If there had been a “hypertext” category, that’s what I would have selected for Babyface. I like the hypertext designation because it retains some of the expectations of the choice-based formats (you’re clicking on links rather than typing commands into a parser) but it shifts the focus away from the actual choices. “Hypertext” opens the door for thinking about links as something other than choices. In Babyface you can probably see this most clearly in the late Thursday night / early Friday morning sequence, when you find yourself back at the Babyface House. You find the same link multiple times in a row, and each time you select it the link remains the same, while the text slowly expands:
You could think of this as a kind of stretchtext. But rather than expanding the narrative by filling in gaps (say, like the stretchtext in Pry), it conveys a paradoxical sense of standing still while nonetheless moving forward.
If I were to drag in narrative theory (yes, I’m going to drag in narrative theory), I think about how Marie-Laure Ryan places interactivity in digital games into two distinct categories. There’s interactivity that corresponds to the player’s perspective: are they embedded in the game as a participant in the story (internal interactivity), or are they looking down from an omniscient godlike perch (external interactivity). And there’s interactivity that corresponds to the kind of actions available to the player, what Ryan calls exploratory versus ontological interactivity. Does the player probe an existing world or set of choices (exploratory interactivity), or does the player have the power to change the game world itself, as in Minecraft (ontological interactivity). I picture these kinds of interactivity like this, along two axes:
FreshRSS 
Exploratory
|
|
|
|
Internal -------+------ External
|
|
|
|
Ontological
A game like The Sims or Civ fits in the external-ontological quadrant. You might consider a first-person shooter to be internal-ontological, depending on how much you think killing NPCs changes the game world might. Babyface clearly fits within the internal-exploratory quadrant. You play as a character, about whom you can glean some details and personal history as the game progresses. That’s internal interactivity. And you can only move about in a world I have strictly delineated. That’s exploratory interactivity. There’s nothing you can do in the game world to change it.
The exploratory nature of the game is heightened by the occasional loop with in-game documents, like the old Polaroid photographs. When the narrator’s father hands her a set of four photos, you can click each multiple times, and each time reveals a different description. In this way I’m trying to convey a sense of discovery about the history of Babyface, one piece of evidence at a time. I programmed that sequence so that it always moves on to the next narrative beat before the narrator’s had a chance to see every description of the photographs. No matter what order you click the photos, there will always be one description you don’t get a chance to see. My hope is that that last piece of evidence becomes an Easter Egg that draws players with a completionist mindset to go through the game again.
So internal-exploratory interactivity. But there’s another kind of interaction with Babyface (ideally, though this won’t be true for all players) that the four quadrants of interactivity doesn’t capture. I call this epistemological interactivity. Epistemological, that’s a mouthful. What I mean by epistemological is the nature of knowledge and knowing in the game. I picture epistemology as a Z axis that juts forward and backward from my graph above, intersecting with the other two axes.
So there’s internal-ontological-epistemological interactivity. That’s solving puzzles in the game that would have an impact on the game world. Of which in Babyface there are none. Then there’s internal-exploratory-epistemological (IEE) interactions, which are mysteries in the game that you can try to figure out, but which won’t impact the game world itself. You could argue that learning how to work the interface is an internal-exploratory-epistemological puzzle. For example, figuring out that at certain points the narrative will only proceed after you click on the photographs several times each. Piecing together details of the narrator’s life is another IEE mystery, as is the story of her mother and Babyface.
But, while there are plenty of clues about the nature of the relationship between the narrator’s mother and Babyface, there’s nothing in the game to definitively explain it. At the heart of Babyface are several kernels of sheer irrationality. To reach any kind of narrative closure about the game, you have to reach beyond the game. That’s external-exploratory-epistemological interactivity. A little bit of research, a little bit of Googling, and some of the odd pieces of Babyface hopefully begin to—well, if not make sense, then at least cohere. One of my early taglines for the game hinted at this nondiegetic epistemological interactivity: “A Southern Gothic horror story, where the only puzzles are metaphysical.” What I meant was, the puzzles the game poses spill beyond the borders of the game.
Another way I conceived of Babyface early on was as a Southern Gothic creepypasta story. I stopped referring to the game as creepypasta, though, because that word (like parser-based or choice-based) carries associations I didn’t necessarily want attached to Babyface. Nevertheless, the game does share a family resemblance to creepypasta. As I see it, two key features of creepypasta (as a genre of fiction, not as a website or Internet phenomenon) are (1) irrationality disrupts the every day world; and (2) there’s a blurring between the inside and outside of the story, raising the specter that the story really happened. Both features operate within the realm of epistemology: What really happened? How do we know? Could it have really happened? Could it happen again?
Those epistemological questions are what I hope the close reader of Babyface walks away with, rattling in their heads. It’s an engagement with the story—interactivity—that happens outside the story itself. For the story I wanted to tell—which is ultimately a story about the year 2020 and the decades leading up to it—this kind of epistemological agency mattered more to me than player agency.
So, Babyface is a thing I made. It’s a creepypasta-style Southern Gothic horror story. I’ve entered the game into the 26th annual Interactive Fiction Competition (IFComp for short). You can play Babyface right now! I’ve followed IFComp for years—since at least 2007—but this is the first time I’ve made anything for the competition. Not that I haven’t wanted to, but finally everything lined up: my idea, the time to write it, the skills to do it, and finally the deliberate shift in my professional life from conventional scholarship to creative coding.
IFComp authors often share a “developer’s diary” that details their creative and coding process. I don’t really consider myself a developer. I’m more of a “I make weird things for the internet” person. But still, I thought I’d give this dev diary thing a try. If nothing else, than to debrief myself about the design process. I’ve blurred the text of any spoilers—just hover or tap on the blurred text to read it.
Babyface wasn’t supposed to be my game for IFComp. I was working on another game, a much larger game, a counterfactual history of eugenics in America. The game is basically asking what if CRISPR-like gene editing technology had been invented in the 1920s, the height of the eugenics movement. The game is heavily researched and includes meaningful choices (unlike Babyface, which is more or less on rails). But! But! But—I ended up talking about the game in conference talks and symposiums and showing it to enough people that it felt like it would be disqualified for IFComp, which has a strict rule that the competition must be the public debut of the game. So I released that game (or rather, the first “chapter” of it) back in May as You Gen #9. Play it, please!
Anyway, I was left without a game, which was fine. But then I had a horrific nightmare in May, and I couldn’t get one image out of my head. It literally haunted me. And then in July Stacey Mason on Twitter announced a fortnightly interactive fiction game jam. So I started playing around with my nightmare, trying to give it context and a narrative frame. Pretty quickly I realized the game was going to be too ambitious (LOL, it’s really quite a modest game, but it felt ambitious to me) to finish in two weeks for a game jam. So I continued working on the game all through August and September. On one hand three months to put together a polished game is not a lot of time. On the other hand, I had been working in Twine almost every day for the past year, and the story is modest (my best estimate is around 16,000 words, though it’s tough to measure word counts in a game with dynamic text). Plus there’s not a lot of state logic to keep track off. No complicated inventory systems, no clever NPCs. Just the narrator, a few interactions, and her memories.
I’ll talk more about specific design choices in a future post, but for now I wanted to say a few words about the setting. Like most Gothic fiction, the setting itself is a character in the game.
I was working with a concrete geography in Babyface. The old brick house is based on a real house in my small North Carolina college town. I could walk there right now in about 20 minutes, all on pleasant neighborhood streets. Less than five minutes by car. A recluse lived there, and the house, as in the game, is down the street from the local elementary school. The recluse died a few years ago, and it was some time before anybody even knew. Somebody eventually bought the property, tore down the old brick house, and put up a gaudy McMansion.
One detail I had wanted to include in the game but decided against, because it would have seemed too unbelievable: between the old house and the elementary school there’s a cemetery. I had considered incorporating the cemetery into the story as the narrator runs away from the house, but it just seemed too forced. One of those instances where real life out-narrativizes fiction, and in order to make the fiction more palatable, you have to dial back the realism.
The Southern backdrop is understated, though I dropped in enough clues that some readers might realize the centrality of the South in the game. More about those later…
In my previous post I listed all the digital creative/critical works I’ve released in the past 12 months. (Whew, it was a lot, in part because I had the privilege to be on sabbatical from teaching in the fall, my first sabbatical since 2006. I made the most of it.)
Now, I want to provide a long overdue introduction to each of my newest works, one post at a time. Let’s start with An End of Tarred Twine, a procedurally-generated hypertext version of Moby-Dick. I made An End of Tarred Twine for NaNoGenMo 2019 (National Novel Generation Month), in which the goal is to write code that writes a 50,000 word novel. Conceived by Darius Kazemi in 2013, NaNoGenMo runs every November, parallel to National Novel Writing Month. I’ve always wanted to participate in NaNoGenMo, but the timing was never good. It falls right during the crunch period of the fall semester. But, hey, I wasn’t teaching last fall, so I could hunker down and finally try something.
An End of Tarred Twine is what I came up with. The title is a line from Moby-Dick, where Captain Bildad, one of the Quaker owners of the Pequod is fastidiously preparing the ship for its departure from Nantucket. As sailmakers mend a top-sail, Bildad gathers up small swatches of sailcloth and bits of tarred twine on the deck that “otherwise might have been wasted.” That Captain Bildad saves even the smallest scrap of waste speaks to his austere—one might say cheap—nature. The line is also one of the few references to twine in the novel. This was important to me because An End of Tarred Twine is made in Twine, an open source platform for writing interactive, nonlinear hypertext narratives.
An End of Tarred Twine is like the white whale itself—at once monstrous and elusive. And that’s because all the links and paths are randomly generated. You start off on the well-known first paragraph of Moby-Dick—Call me Ishmael & etc.—but random links in that passage lead to random passages, which lead to other random passages. Very quickly, you’re lost, reading Moby-Dick one passage at a time, out of order, with no map to guide you. Or as Ishmael says about the birthplace of Queequeg, the location “is not down in any map; true places never are.”
Here, this GIF shows you what I mean. It starts with the start of Moby Dick but quickly jumps into uncharted waters.
This traversal starts off in chapter 1, jumps to chapter 24, then on to chapter 105, and so on. One paragraph at a time, in random order, with no logic behind the links that move from passage to passage. As a reading experience, it’s more conceptual than practical, akin to the Modernist-inflected hypertext novels of the 1980s. As a technical experiment, I personally think there’s some interesting stuff going on.
Look at these stats. An End of Tarred Twine has:
Another visual might help you appreciate the complexity of the work. One of the cool features of the official Twine app (i.e. where you write and code your interactive narrative) is that Twine maps each passage on a blueprint-like grid. For the typical Twine project, this narrative map offers a quick overview of the narrative structure of your story. For example, here’s what Masks, one of my other recent projects, looks like on the backend in Twine:
Each black line and arrow represents a link from one passage to the next. Now look at what An End of Tarred Twine looks like on the backend in Twine:
The first passage (labeled 0) is the title screen, with the word “Loomings” linking to the second passage (1). You can see that passage then has outbound links as well as some inbound links. Here’s another view, deeper into the hypertext:
There are so many links between passages by this point that the link lines become a dense forest of scribbles. You can almost image those lines as a detail taken from Rockwell Kent’s stunning illustration of Moby Dick breaching the ocean in his 1930 edition of Moby-Dick.
Now, how did I create this unnavigable monstrosity? The point of NaNoGenMo is that you write the code that writes the novel. That’s really the only criteria. The novel itself doesn’t have to be good (it won’t be) or even readable (it won’t be).
Here’s how I made a several-thousand passage Twine with many more thousands of random connections between those passages:
You can check out the Python program that does the heavy-lifting on Github. But I thought people might also want to see what the Twee code looks like. It’s so simple. Here’s the first main passage. The double colons signify the passage title. So this passage is “1.” Then whenever you see double brackets, that’s a link to a different passage, which is also a number. For example, the name “Ishmael” becomes a link to passage #1626.
:: 1
Call me [[Ishmael->1626]]. [[Some years ago->2297]]--never mind how long precisely--having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly [[November->526]] in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off--then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.
The links in this sample Twee code are different from the version of An End of Tarred Twine that I posted for NaNoGenMo and published on Itch. Because every time I run the Python script it creates an entirely new hypertext, with new links and paths through it. This what tickles me most about the project: anyone can take the source text and my Python program and generate their own version of An End of Tarred Twine. It reminds me of Aaron Reed’s recent novel Subcutanean, in which every printed version is different, algorithmically altered so that words, phrases, even entire scenes vary from one copy to the next—yet each version tells the fundamentally same story. In her review of Subcutanean, Emily Short suggests that the multitudinous machined variations fit the theme of the novel, of “the unknowable proliferation of motives and outcomes.”
Similarly, with An End of Tarred Twine we could have thousands of versions of the story, none alike. Just fork my code and make your own. A thousand different paths through Moby-Dick, none of them really Moby-Dick, but all of them monstrously “nameless, inscrutable, unearthly”—like the vengeful malice that drives Ahab himself to his ruin, dragging his beleaguered crew down with him.
When you’re a college professor, you follow a different calendar from the rest of the grown-up world. There’s school and there’s summer, and that’s how you plot your time. Of course, a global pandemic wreaks havoc on this calendar. But usually, somewhere about now I stop thinking about the previous academic year and start looking ahead to the next one. My New Year begins on July 1, not January 1.
Since I’m closing the books on the 2019-2020 school year, I wanted to remind myself of all the projects I put out into the world during this time. Here in one place are all the critical-creative digital works I released in the past 12 months. I’ll write more about many of these projects later, so right now a blurb for each will have to suffice. Hopefully that’s enough to pique your interest…
Log (October 2019) – imagines what a Ring “smart” doorbell cam might see on a Halloween night Log, this version imagines what a Ring camera might see during an early day of the coronavirus quarantineIn general I was working in one of two modes for each project: procedural generation or interactive fiction. The former hopes to surprise readers with serendipitous juxtapositions and combinations, the latter hopes to entice readers with narrative impact. Whether I succeed at either is a question I’ll leave to others.
