The Corruption

I find most game stories extremely obnoxious. Beyond the irritations with craftsmanship and cliche, beyond being merely bored and annoyed, there are patterns I see over and over again in intros and cutscenes and store pages that are distastefully tedious and tediously distasteful. Here’s the format of a game intro: This is our world, and it’s great – it better be, we paid a bunch of artists to make this shit! But there’s also some sort of encroaching darkness, some kind of ancient evil, some kind of corruption. It’s made bunch of guys show up to start shit, and they look basically human but, trust me, they are huge jerks in an irrevocably genetically ingrained way; or maybe they’re just magical constructs that look like guys; maybe they’re skeletons or something. In any case, it’s completely fine to kill all of them, and is actually a good thing to do.

This is all obviously at its worst in fantasy titles, though it’s a loose enough archetype that it could be easily applied to a lot of games even outside that domain. There’s often some good and kind king who has been dethroned in the process, some kind of sacred order being profaned, some sort of holy war, whatever. This is all obviously, when examined critically for half a second, an absurdly reactionary framing – one could use the (bad) excuse that it’s all a riff on Tolkien, but even his works had more nuance, and he was willing to admit that the definition of certain races and creatures as constitutionally evil was probably not ideal. Yet this is what a lot of games hew back to: Stories of dark external corruption staining a natural brilliant beauty – a bunch of Make Faeryland Great Again bullshit. Another aspect of this that is very frustrating is how often it seems to crop up in games inspired by Dark Souls, since that game in particular avoided these cliches very adroitly. There is an old god-king – but his and other gods’ senseless clinging to power is a big part of why that world is so fucked up in the first place. There is a “darkness”, a “corruption”, but this is more of a powerful primordial force that can change things for better or for worse. Dark Souls takes so many of these cliches and plays with them in such clever ways, it’s rather revolting to see so many supposed successors play every cliché straight in the most boring possible ways. In addition to being pretty gross, these sorts of stories are extremely boring. Why are we on the side of the king? Why is the corruption evil? Why do we have a better claim to the land than that “corruption” does? We just do, that’s why. It’s bad, we’re not, and you can tell because our UI markings are blue and theirs are red.

Every time I notice something like this, I want to tear it to pieces. This is actually proving to be something of an issue for me on my current project: Part of what I want to do with Bound City is to tackle the ideas of nostalgia and retro-fetishism and the reactionary ideas baked into them, but there are so many little stupid cliches like this that I get overwhelmed. The unstoppable crime waves, the good kings who give quests and whose lives are inseparable from the well-being of the land, the oozing corruption, the untamed wilderness, the pure language of violence, the destruction of beast and environment to harvest resources, the weirdly absolutist moral judgments – it’s wild how many of these often contradictory ideas manage to simultaneously permeate the overall narrative space of games, and it doesn’t feel right to not try to skewer them wherever I have an opportunity.

All too often, though, the games that take aim at the cliches of game narrative and design simply do so by restating them in plain language and rely on that absurdity to appear humorous and insightful. Most of the time it’s pretty superficial stuff like isn’t it weird how many games have you kleptomaniacally steal anything that isn’t bolted down? Almost never are the narrative precepts of good kings and halcyon pasts and corrupting darkness questioned, almost never is it posited as not obvious where a just hero would stand on these things. But who are we, the game players? Do we not have more in common with a “corruption”, something alive and desperate and shifting and evolving, than the royalty, something tyrannical and wealthy and stagnant? Why are we enemies of random animals and creatures? Who gets defined as intractably evil and therefore worthy of massacre? Where are we placed in the narrative, and where do we want to be?

These are the sorts of questions I want to ask – not merely to invoke nostalgia, not merely to poke fun at the occasional silly contradictions, but to ask what lusts and justifications are fed by these sorts of narratives, to ask why we crave them – and to ask what, should we choose to reject them, happens next?

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Telling Stories in School

After watching through Better Call Saul I apparently decided I still didn’t have enough anxiety in my life and subsequently binged through Barry – a comedy series following a hitman, played by Bill Hader, who stumbles into a Los Angeles acting class while following a target and subsequently decides to become an actor. I’m going to discuss the broad narrative themes and arc of Barry but won’t be going into much detail, so this all should be fine for the spoiler-averse. I was initially put off by the show’s premise, as comedies about violence are a mixed bag: They can serve to trivialize violence or to portray its innate absurdity, serve to apologize for those who enact it or to humanize them – and these descriptions probably sound rather similar on first glance, which itself illustrates the problem. Violence is a powerful and complicated thing, and doing it justice is a sophisticated challenge, one exacerbated by the challenges of creating a good comedy.

Fortunately, the writers seem to be aware of all this, and while it is an absurd and over the top show it is also frequently quite thoughtful regarding these topics. Though the initial episodes toy with the question of whether it’s possible for Barry to give up his career and lifestyle to become a good person, this question almost becomes a running gag due to its sheer absurdity. What does it even mean to be a good person? Does it merely mean living an inoffensive life where you don’t do any obvious harm? If that’s all it is, then isn’t that just an easy life? I mean, who doesn’t want to be that kind of “good person”? Is being good merely living the good life? That is, however, the kind of good person most of us are: The goodness of convenience. The goodness of buying products subsidized by distant blood rather than blood of neighbors, the goodness of exported violence and imported goods rather than local violence with localized harms. This is the kind of good person that only relatively comfortable get to be, a goodness that correlates with wealth. The good person is a story we tell over and over to comfort ourselves, to make sense of things, to assure our anxious brains that all is in order, all is correct, that all is for the best in this the best of all possible worlds.

What Barry is really about is these stories we tell ourselves. Los Angeles is the ideal setting for this, a city of dreams where reality blends seamlessly into fiction – BoJack Horseman, another complicated story of a bad person who dreams of being better, uses the setting similarly. The people in Barry’s acting class don’t just seek a skill, but seek stories – not stories as sequences of events, but as structures to make sense of sequences of events. The secondary protagonist Sally, a woman who Barry meets in class and enters a relationship with, has her own complicated relationship with violence: As a survivor of domestic abuse she’s still trying to make sense of her own history, constantly approaching and retreating from violence, struggling to articulate her anger without being overwhelmed by it. Gene, the instructor of the class, has lived a life of narcissism mediated by narrative justification, living in a story all about himself – after all, as Fuches, Barry’s erstwhile handler meditates, “Everyone’s the hero of their own story.”

This truism is appropriate enough, but our actual relationship with stories is a bit more complicated, the roles we cast ourselves into more nuanced than purely heroic. We understand the world through narrative structures, through parable and myth and anecdote – and, while most of us do it by habit, art provides an opportunity to take control of the process. Just as we can use art to shape our own narratives, we can share it with others to help them shape theirs – a process that can be generous or malicious, depending how the practice and practitioner. There are industries built around constructing and controlling these narratives: Arts and entertainment, obviously, but somewhat more subtly marketing, politics, education, and even sometimes the sciences. These fields all twine together, are motivated and weaponized by one another. Barry becomes a killer because of the story of patriotic violence, a hitman because of the story of familial and military fidelity, an actor because of simplistic narratives of redemption and forgiveness… a person always taking action but always at the whims of his story, a story in which he has probably not always been the hero. We also learn to regard others in terms of our story. People get typecast as villains, as love interests, as father figures, as confidantes, even when it doesn’t make much sense, even when the role doesn’t line up with the person.

It’s thoughts like these that make me terrified and suspicious of the power of art. It’s such a tempting place to exist, a warm self-annihilating cocoon where everything in the world becomes hypothetical, every terror an experience, every regret a learning moment. I think it is healthy to spend some time here and impossible never to retreat here; nevertheless, the perspective from inside the cocoon is only helpful when it can sees the world outside clearly. When a story finally emerges from the cocoon, slowly sprouts its wings and flies away, we must take care to see that the stories it reproduces later on do not shape further tragedies, terrors, and regrets. Perhaps, though, a regret or two might not go amiss – maybe that’s the idealistic wish underpinning the show is that somehow, somewhere, there’s a story potent enough and poignant enough to finally instill the wicked with a conscience.

A pen may be mightier than a sword, but it is terribly difficult to aim at the distance at which it is most effective.

Bound City DevBlog, October 2022 – Little Lives

This has been, to my chagrin, the least productive month of the project so far. I’ve already talked about most of the things pushing back against my progress, and all of those continue to do so. The arc of progress seems, to me, to be an asymptotic approach towards completion: The further away the goal is, the more rapidly I can approach it. One reason for this seems to be that, when there are many tasks standing between me and completion, I can pick them up as I think of solutions or feel particularly motivated to tackle them and use that momentum to advance rapidly. Conversely, when there’s only a few tasks left, I have to sit and think about solutions and pick at them bit by bit to make painstaking progress. It’s like eating a big bowl of popcorn: When you start it’s easy and fun and light, but when you get to the bottom it’s full of little hard kernels that never properly popped, and if you want to finish the job you have to slowly chew them up, one by one, each buttery desiccated kernel. Nevertheless, they must be eaten – in this metaphor, anyway, I don’t usually eat the actual kernels.

So okay. I went around working on this and that, as I could see ways to advance towards a goal. I made a number of tweaks and fixes to the dialogue system, I polished up a bunch of the character portraits, I added new single-frame animations to the main character for turning and for pushing against walls. Nothing big, but little fixes to things that had been bothering me.

I decided, though, that what’s really blocking my progress here is simply that I don’t have confidence in the story and writing of the game. I’m so fucking excited about so many of the ideas that I’m playing with in this project that I’m terrified of messing them up, forgetting bits and pieces, expressing a powerful idea ineffectively, concealing or revealing too much too late. I’m in idea debt to myself, hypnotized by possibility and humbled by impossibility. This state of affairs is probably going to continue until I have a Plan, a structure, something that makes it feel like I can tackle each problem individually without completely losing my place.

Easier said than done. I have a long list of “don‘ts“, which turns out to be much harder to work off of than a short list of do’s. I don’t want to have what so many games have, characters who give quests which you do to get stuff– I really dislike how many games boil down to the idea that you should help people because they might give you their old enchanted hat. I don’t want to have characters that just sit around and say the same few things over and over, I don’t want to have characters with broken lives left around for the player to fix, I don’t want the character stories to just be static events that always happen exactly the same way… so many things to avoid, it seems sometimes to chart a very narrow path indeed. To simplify and reduce some of this pressure, I’ve started trying to note down little bits of character arc – essentially just try to figure out, on a case by case basis, what I think each character’s story is about and where I see it potentially ending up

What sucks is that while I’ve just written several paragraphs about why this is necessary work, I still feel like I haven’t done anything all month. The writing is a little better now, there’s a little more of it, it has a little more direction, but I still have no real confidence in it and don’t exactly know how to address that. It starts to feel like this entire aspect of the project is an albatross around the neck, is just slowing everything down – but perhaps that which adds weight also adds momentum, and as an artist I do want to maximize impact.

After a certain point, anxiously pacing the same ground over and over loses its appeal. One of the things I was planning on doing after finishing the demo/vertical slice was completely overhauling the sound system, and in order to avoid needing to figure this shit out I just went ahead and started working on that. I went into some detail on where I’m at on that task in this Cohost post – suffice it to say that at this point I anticipate it being another week or so of work to finish it up.

Okay. What now? This month, I finish and implement the overhauled sound system, go through the writing again and send it out to some test-readers so I can exorcise my anxiety around it, put together the intro illustrations, and playtest/finalize all the in-game scripting. That sentence covers effectively everything that needs to be done to wrap up the demo version of the project. It sounds so easy! The hard part is just… accepting that whatever I do is going to have flaws, and that there will never be a perfect realization of these ideas, and just resolving to do what I can here and now.

This struggle will be ongoing, but I think I’m winning. Slowly.

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