Guest Post | "Wait, Video Games Have Writers?" by Jay Posey

One of the subjects I touched on in my review of Jay Posey's debut was the idea of the novel as a collaborative process, because in much the same way that video games require the participation of their players, Three requires its readers to do a little of the legwork.

This wasn't something I minded in the slightest — rather than getting hung up on the lack of facts in the first act, I applauded the resulting sense of individual discovery — yet so many authors are content to spoon-feed us everything we need to know (and more) that I suppose I can see why some of Three's readers have complained about Posey's decision to leave certain elements of his narrative and characters to our imagination.

I can see... but I completely disagree. In fact, I think this approach is one of the book's biggest boons.

Yet there is somewhere a balance to be struck, between too much and not enough, and Jay Posey has a fascinating perspective on this question, informed by his day job making video games... as he explains.

***

In addition to being an author, I’ve also been very fortunate to get to do one of the coolest jobs in the world which is, of course, making video games!  Game development probably doesn’t rank quite as highly as, say, underwater photography, vacation tester, or bacon entrepreneur, but I think it’s still up there as one of those pretty cool jobs that lots of people wish they had. (Or at least, that they think they wish they had.)

But when you do the job I do — I’m a Senior Narrative Designer at Red Storm Entertainment, where Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon and Rainbow Six franchises were born — there’s a great conversation to be had that goes something like:

Interested Guest at Party: “So, Jay, what do you do for a living?”
Me: “I’m a writer.”
Interested Guest at Party: “Oh, wow, that’s so cool!  So, like movies?  Or books?  Or what?”
Me: “Video games, mostly.”
Suddenly Dramatically Less Interested Guest at Party: “Ooohhh, I thought you meant like a real writer.”

(That of course is completely made up, as I never get invited to parties.)

Some may be surprised to learn that, in fact, many real writers do work in the video game industry. Mary DeMarle, Amy Hennig, Rhianna Pratchett, Christy Marx, Marc Laidlaw, Anthony Burch, Erik Wolpaw, Drew Holmes, Andy Walsh, T.J. Fixman, Steve Jaros, Tom Abernathy, Aaron Linde, Richard Dansky. I could go on and on listing awesome writers who already work in games, but I won’t — even though I’ve left a bunch off the list and they will probably be letting me know via Twitter in short order. Sorry guys!

Now, I’ll be the first to admit, it’s sometimes hard to tell that great writers are doing great things in games from the final product. There are a lot of broken attempts at storytelling out there to be sure.  As an industry, we still have the habit of falling back on other media’s rules when we flounder (that’s why we still have so many cutscenes). There’s also a fairly frequent refrain that shows up in discussions of video game storylines that says what the Industry really needs is just to hire one or more big name Hollywood writers to come in and teach game developers how to write. Certainly, there are plenty of studios/publishers out there that could use a little nudge to help them see why hiring a professional writer early on might be a better way to go than asking an overworked developer to “slap some story on” at the end of a project.

BUT.

There are some important things folks should know.

On the one hand, Story is Story. Humans have been telling stories pretty much since the Dawn of Man. There are a number of aspects of telling stories that work regardless of whether you’re working on a long-form novel or on a video game. The importance of characters, how dialogue works, how to create intriguing plot twists and satisfying emotional pay-offs, all of these things (and more) are applicable to storytelling in a variety of different media, whether it’s radio, TV, film, prose, stageplays, comics, whatever.

On the other hand, every medium has its own particular strengths. Books give us access to a character’s internal life. Movies excel at visual storytelling. TV shows frequently tell us many stories at once, and episodically sustain us over the course of weeks, or months, or years. And all of those media have something in common: the writers control the characters.

The strength of games is their interactivity. While other media are primarily passively received, games are fundamentally active. Whereas a movie audience might be content to sit and watch events unfold on a big screen to characters they cannot influence, gamers expect to participate in their own experience. Which means as a writer of games, you can always count on having at least one wild-card in your cast: the player. 

Players want to influence and experience the world that a game lets them inhabit. Players want to matter.  Some of them want to be good citizens of your game world, role-playing the character you’ve asked them to be. Others want to interact however they see fit, and will run around jumping on boxes while you deliver important news about the alien invasion, or will pick-pocket the clothes off of every citizen in town.

Game writing is ultimately collaborative. As a writer, the story you write isn’t complete until the player engages with it and makes it her own experience. And while there have been many missteps, and will continue to be more along the way, I can assure you that there are already real writers in the industry who are passionately striving to decipher the power of video games as a story-telling medium, who are daily working to bring gamers amazing story experiences that are both personally meaningful and yet shared within a community, and who one day will, I believe, be heralded as heroes of the craft.

Or, at the very least, maybe as level 99 writers.

***

Jay Posey has been described as “fascinating,” “insightful,” “highly entertaining,” “extremely handsome,” and “one of the most dynamic speakers in the Posey household” by parties who may or may not have been biased or himself.

Thanks a million for the guest post, Posey!

With which, I'm going to give the floor to you folks. Any thoughts on the notion of the novel as a collaborative process versus the video game as an interactive narrative?

Book Review | Three by Jay Posey

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The world has collapsed, and there are no heroes any more.

But when a lone gunman reluctantly accepts the mantel of protector to a young boy and his dying mother against the forces that pursue them, such a man may yet arise.

File Under: Science Fiction [Three For All | Apocalyptic Wasteland | A Journey Home | Fear the Weir]

***

Imagine a meeting of the minds behind the Fallout franchise and The Dark Tower saga. That's Three: a desperate western about obsession, regret and redemption set in the sandblasted wilderness of a world that's gone to hell in a handbasket. Not that we know when, or why... just that it has.

Nor does the author spend a great deal of time establishing the central character his debut is named after. However heroic, Three, we see, is frustratingly stoic: a bounty-hunter with an unspeakable secret. But in a very real sense, his silence is his strength, while what we don't know about the wasteland serves to make our journey through it that much more thrilling.

Some readers are likely to find this apparent lack of motivation and explanation unsatisfying, but Three isn't actually absent worldbuilding or character development at all; it just happens to happen in the background. Thus, there are few, if any infodumps, and the protagonist does not often monologue on his origins. Instead, we put the pieces of the puzzle together ourselves. We use our own imaginations to fill in the blanks.

Participation, then, is a prerequisite. Best to leave Three be, really, if you aren't prepared to play the game Jay Posey makes of it. But if you are? Then allow me an industry in-joke: it may just blow you away.

Let's back up a bit for a minute.

Three, when we meet, has come to town to cash in a bounty, but the agent who's supposed to pay him doesn't have enough Hard on hand to cover the outstanding amount, so he's made to wait.

Waiting, I'm afraid, isn't one of our man's many strengths:

"It was like this when he didn't have a job; something to find, someone to bring in. The restlessness was setting in, the need to move. To hunt. It was the third day in the same town. Might as well have been a month. There were benefits to being a freelancer, but down time wasn't one of them." (p.20)

That's where Cass and Wren come in: a Quint addict on the run from a special someone and her supernaturally sensitive son. Three doesn't take much interest when he first lays eyes on the pitiable pair, but their paths just keep on crossing. Soon enough he ends up saving them from certain death—all in a day's work, eh?—then, when he realises that they won't last long without his help, he reluctantly accepts the mantle of temporary protector.

And so the ragtag trio take to the wasteland... where there be Weir, I fear: a hive of cyber-zombies, in short, with burning blue orbs for eyes and the uncanny ability to track their targets' digital signatures. This is a particular problem in world where everyone (well, almost everyone) has come to rely on implants which connect them to the cloud.

By the by, there's more to Cass and Wren than meets the eye. Though he has no control over it, the little fella has a unique ability, and between her spiralling habit and her disgruntled former employers—a band of brutal brainhackers—Cass's past is catching up with her fast. Had Three known what a handful they'd be between them, things would have been different, undoubtedly, however "he was responsible for them now. And in a sudden flash he felt, without question, they were the mistake that would cost him his life. [But] he wasn't sure it was a mistake at all." (p.162)

And that's pretty much the plot. Again: not a lot, but enough—just—to get us going. Indeed, Three represents a real roller-coaster if we're willing to play our parts. To engage with the world and the characters and the narrative in the same sort of way we may in a video game.

Tellingly, Jay Posey has been involved in that very industry since 1998. Currently, he's a Senior Narrative Designer at Red Storm Entertainment, the creators of two Tom Clancy-branded franchises—I give you Ghost Recon and Rainbow Six—and if these series haven't been especially progressive in terms of the tales they've told, they've made for great rides regardless. As sandboxes for incredible set-pieces and immersive gameplay experiences rather than solely stories, they've done the trick, I think.

This ethos—of encouraging the player to participate in the construction of each aspect of the entire—also applies to our role as readers of Three. I for one was perfectly pleased to do a little of the heavy lifting, because Posey makes discovery fun, and keeps things interesting in the interim.

Not to lean too heavily on the video game angle, but I delighted in identifying scenes from Three via that vocabulary. There are stealth sections, then, in between all the brawling; minibosses at the end of each act; collectibles and sidequests; moments that reminded me of objective-based multiplayer modes like capture and hold.

I could go on, but suffice it to say that Three is an unmistakable gamey debut. But this is no bad thing—and no surprise considering Jay Posey's professional pedigree. The premise is certainly nothing new, and at the outset, the characters are rather unremarkable, but the author's distinctive approach to storytelling superimposes a firstly fascinating and finally satisfying dimension upon what could very easily have been a bland book.

As is, it isn't. On the contrary, I had all the fun reading Three. Honestly, all of it.

***

Three
by Jay Posey

UK Publication: August 2013, Angry Robot
US Publication: July 2013, Angry Robot

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Quoth the Scotsman | Charlie Human on The Illusion of Maturity

Brace yourself for the most disgusting thing I've ever uttered in the four years I've been blogging on The Speculative Scotsman.

Are you ready?

Next year, I'm turning 30.

Horror of horrors, huh? Well, it seems as much to me at least.

If teaching children has taught me one thing, it's that anyone over 18 is, and I quote, "old." Thing of it is, I don't feel a great deal different than I did a decade ago—excepting the eye strain and the back pain. I'm the same soul, but my body betrays me. The bastard!

On that note, a quote that touches on the same subject. It's from Charlie Human's debut, Apocalypse Now Now:

"You know David Copperfield the illusionist, right? He did this one trick where he walked through the Great Wall of China. They made a huge thing of it, attached heart rate monitors to him, in case he got 'stuck' inside the stone. He walked through and the wall went all stretchy, but the whole time you know it's all crap, it's just an illusion that you want to believe is real." 

At this stage I have no idea where Ronin is going with this but I decide just to go with it. I nod. 

"Well, that's what becoming an adult is like," Ronin continues. "You think there's this great dividing line between child and adult, you're brought up believing that you're gonna do this trick, right, walk through the wall between the two, become an adult. But you get to the other side and you realise it's just an illusion, there was no wall, just some smoke and mirrors. There is no line between old and young, the only things that mark your passing are the things that go wrong—the car accidents, cancers and heart attacks." 

That's Ronin's idea of a motivational speech and strangely, in a way, it works. After all, if I'm going to die, it's good to know that most of what I'm going to be missing out on is mortgages, waiting in traffic and misunderstanding my wife. Sure, hopefully there'd also be threesomes in hot tubs, hoverboards and the singularity, by weighed against the absolute certainty of the mundane nature of real life it all somehow looks less attractive. (pp.252-253)

Apocalypse Now Now will be published by Century Press in the UK in early August. I'll be posting my review of it soon. In the interim, suffice it to say I'm a fan, man!

Book Review | Winter Damage by Natasha Carthew

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The moor in winter is no place for a girl travelling alone. It's cold out there. There's snow, but it's the wind that grabs hold of your heart and freezes it.

Just before Christmas, Ennor Carne sets out on a quest to find her missing mother. The home she leaves is a broken-down trailer, with her sick dad and her little brother, and a few skinny cows that's left of what was once a family farm. She takes warm clothes, what food she can find, a map and a gun — but nothing, nothing can prepare her for what lies ahead.

Ennor is just fourteen years old. She thinks she knows where she's going and what she's looking for. She doesn't know anything.

***

As abhorrent as the thought is—of billions dead and the world wasted, whether by natural disaster or man-made calamity—it's fair to say that folks today take a certain pleasure in positing the apocalypse.

The appeal is apparent if we begin by admitting that the lot of modern life is lacking; that we are all dissatisfied with ourselves in one way or another. The end of everything, then, represents a chance to change. To break with the people we have been in the past, and be... better, I guess. So the world goes to war and we wonder: will we suddenly discover hidden depths, reserves of inner strength? The polar ice caps melt and overnight we could be leaders—heroes, even!

Fantasising about the apocalypse is a peculiar pastime, perhaps, but not pointless. At the very least, it begs an arresting theoretical question: how would we cope with the end of world as we know it?

Winter Damage's protagonist Ennor Carne counts.

A fourteen year-old farmer's daughter whose dad has seen better days, and whose autistic brother Trip requires round-the-clock care, Ennor takes "comfort in the counting of things." (p.239) To count is of course to take control in some small way, to impose order upon chaos, and there's been a lot of that latter in her life lately.

Since the last outbreak of foot-and-mouth things had turned worse from the top of the country to the bottom. Ennor didn't remember it all so well. She was only seven at the time and losing the prize cattle was the least of their problems once they had lost the farmhouse and the land and her dad went half mad with the misery and then the drugs. (p.7)

Squirrelled away in the wilderness, the Carne family have managed to make ends meet in the seven years since, but now the money's run out, and the council are threatening to take the kids into care while the country descends into a modern-day dark age.

Nearing the end of her teenage tether, Ennor remembers her mother. Her mother, who upped sticks and abandoned the family with a defiant glint in her eye long before the collapse, as if in obscene agreement, of civilised society. Against good reason, Ennor imagines her mother might be able to save them, or at least lend a helping hand.

She knows where she went—not that far away from the farm, in fact—so as opposed to waiting for the world to right itself somehow, she packs a bag, leaves her brother with her best friend Butch, and journeys alone into the wintry wilderness.

Her mother waltzed into her dream with her sanity intact and happiness for everyone was a given. [But] the merry flight of fantasy soon turned shocking and unbearable and Ennor sat balled and cold and insignificant to the world, the past hanging like an old damp coat hooked to the back of a door, lifeless and rotten. She pressed her hands over her eyes and dug her fingers in close to popping, pinning what couldn't be explained to the back of her mind to stop herself from crying. (p.55)

Needless to say, things don't go according to plan. Within hours of setting out she's injured her ankle badly, lost her map, and killed another kid—and winter has only just begun. If Ennor doesn't exhaust her scant supplies and starve, she'll surely freeze to death without shelter. But other people are seeking shelter as well... and other people are to be avoided at all costs.

Not because they've turned into zombies or anything along those lines—let's be clear about that from the start. Indeed, excepting the apocalyptic elements of the premise, there's nothing speculative about this novel at all. Its world is our world, albeit broken, and its people, equally, are our people: good and bad but mostly both, though the desperate times Winter Damage mines have demanded they take desperate measures.

On the surface, the situation is not dissimilar to that Cormac McCarthy explored in The Road: an appropriate point of reference for Winter Damage's first third if you can imagine that haunting tale told from the boy's perspective rather than the man's, and substitute its skeletal North American setting for the ghostly Cornish coast.

That said, Winter Damage is a much more optimistic novel than The Road. A surprising assertion, I'm sure, given how unbearably bleakly it begins, not to mention how horrendous Ennor's early hardships are. But overall, her journey charts a positive path. She makes a fabulous friend, Sonny, who shows her that there's still warmth to be had, however scant; a wonderful world to turn, however far it's fallen. Sonny gives Ennor hope again; instils in her a promise more potent than the prospect that her runaway mother will in any way save the day.

They laughed and Ennor remarked on what a ragtag family they had made and her words brought comfort to the others because that was what they had become. No matter what the future held, they would have that for ever and always stitched between them. (p.249)

Even at its most miserable—and oh, there are many low moments—Winter Damage is a truly beautiful book, bolstered in large part by a delicate cast of characters and a sublime sense of setting, but what sets it apart in the end is its impeccable prose. Hard to believe, really, that this is Natasha Carthew's first novel. She's published three volumes of poetry before, though, and it shows. Her words are carefully weighted: her descriptions, her dialogue, and the dialect in which she renders said inform a multitude of moods marvellously, meanwhile the mounting sound and essential sense of her sentences rings out as right in a manner most novelists never even attempt.

Small but perfectly formed, Winter Damage is the sort of book that begs to be read out loud, even if there's no-one else near to hear it. It's a stone-cold stunner with an uncommonly humble heart, and I urge you to take in into yours, too.

***

Winter Damage
by Natasha Carthew

UK Publication: August 2013, Bloomsbury
US Publication: January 2014, Bloomsbury USA

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Coming Attractions | A Taste of Trillium

I may have taken my sweet time reading it, but at this late stage, I'm happy to come out and say that Sweet Tooth is without a doubt one of the very best Vertigo series there's ever been. If the imprint is indeed on the way out, as recent rumours suggest — though more recent statements have refuted these rumours — then Sweet Tooth is perfectly positioned to do double-duty as a swan song.

And what a song it sung.

But it's finished, now. The final trade paperback, namely Wild Game, was published last month. And much as I approve of actual endings, and I do — especially in the comics form, where stories either take lifetimes to tell, or are cruelly cancelled — I very much miss my monthly Jeff Lemire fix.

Luckily, there's more to look forward to from the award-winning singer/songwriter. Beginning with Trillium: an eight-issue limited series which "combines rich historical adventure and mind-bending science fiction into a sprawling, unconventional love story."

Courtesy Comic Book Resources, I give you the plot, and two pages from the comic proper. If there ever was a time to click to embiggen, incidentally, this is it!

It’s the year 3797, and botanist Nika Temsmith is researching a strange species on a remote science station near the outermost rim of colonized space. It’s the year 1921, and renowned English explorer William Pike leads an expedition into the dense jungles of Peru in search of the fabled “Lost Temple of the Incas,” an elusive sanctuary said to have strange healing properties. Two disparate souls separated by thousands of years and hundreds of millions of miles. Yet they will fall in love and, as a result, bring about the end of the universe. Even though reality is unraveling all around them, nothing can pull them apart. This isn’t just a love story; It’s the LAST love story ever told.

The first issue of Trillium will be released in early August.

If you have a heart, you'll buy it.

Book Review | Mr Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan

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Recession has shuffled Clay Jannon out of his job as a web-designer and into a job working the night shift at Mr Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. It is a curious shop with curious customers who wander in only to borrow obscure encoded volumes, all according to some arrangement with the mysterious Mr Penumbra. 

Intrigued and a little bored, Clay runs a computer analysis of the customers’ behaviour – and discovers that the dusty books and their dusty readers hold the key to a secret that stretches right back to when bookmaking began.

***

Have you ever felt the need to read? Been struck by the siren song of an awesome novel?

If you have — and I warrant we (you, reading this, and me) are well acquainted with this wonderful weakness — if you have, you'll know that it's one thing to want a book, but another to need one; to feel with every fibre of your being that you cannot be complete until you have swallowed the whole of some story.

For Clay Jannon, in his youth, the concluding volume of The Dragon-Song Chronicles fit the bill above, but in the years since the climax of said fictional fantasy saga, he hasn't felt so intensely about anything else. Not a book, not a woman, not a job — not nothing. Down on his luck at the outset of Robin Sloan's endearing if digressive debut, and hoping, perhaps, to recapture some of that passion, he applies for a job in a small bookshop in the Broadway district of San Francisco.

And that's all it takes. From the moment Clay crosses the threshold of Mr Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, life is suddenly interesting again.

Inside: imagine the shape and volume of a normal bookstore turned up on its side. This place was absurdly narrow and dizzyingly tall, and the shelves went all the way up — three stories of books, maybe more. I craned my neck back [...] and the shelves faded smoothly into the shadows in a way that suggested they might go on forever. (pp.7-8)

In part, this puzzling new perspective rallies his passion — his need, indeed. And it isn't long before Clay realises there's something funny going on when it comes to Mr Penumbra's customers. That said, it's a stretch to even call them customers, because they don't buy books from the front of the store: rather, they rent them from its mysterious rear.

Clay's first thought is that these folks are part of an arcane lending library, and soon his curiosity gets the better of him: he breaks the first rule of this unusual book club, and looks at one of the musty old tomes. He doesn't find a story, but a code... and down the rabbit hole he goes!

What unfolds is a magnificent mystery, initially. An investigation into what Clay christens the Waybacklist and the readers evidently addicted to it. It isn't to give the game away to say they're actually code-crackers: initiates of an ancient order dedicated to the study of a puzzle which has gone unsolved for many centuries. Their promised reward for finally figuring out this riddle? No less than life eternal.

To followers of the order, this is practically "catnip: a code to be cracked and the key to immortality, all in one," (p.148) though Clay is less than convinced by its supernatural aspect:

"I don't believe the immortality part, but I do know the feeling that Penumbra is talking about. Walking the stacks in a library, dragging your fingers across the spines — it's hard not to feel the presence of sleeping spirits. That's just a feeling, not a fact, but remember (I repeat): people believe weirder things than this." (p.147)

Which, sure, is true.

But Clay, needless to say, is a child of our time. The only things he really has faith in are his mobile phone and his MacBook, so of course he cannot resist applying contemporary tech to the old code Penumbra has dedicated his days to deciphering. This ambitious endeavour leads him to cross paths with Kat, who works for Google, and has at her fingertips resources equivalent to many million like minds.

I'm afraid this is where Sloan's first novel loses the larger part of its pull, because as soon as Google gets a look in, the narrative practically collapses. To a certain extent, the corporation's involvement helps to situate to strange amongst the true, lending credibility to the story's more incredible elements, but the trade-off is just too much. With every passing chapter, the central mystery becomes less magnetic.

Like The Shadow of the Wind, to which this text bears a deceptive resemblance, Mr Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore is at its very best when it taps into our love of literature — and at its very best, it is as remarkable a novel as Carlos Ruiz Zafon's first for adult audiences: a cryptic diptych, equally smart and sweet, warm and honest, esoteric, intriguing, and wonderfully witty.

Sadly, Sloan struggles to sustain the most effective elements of his debut, indulging instead in lengthy love letters to the aforementioned gods of tomorrow's technology — among a number of less distracting digressions. That said, these occur so often, and over the course of such a short novel, that an alarming proportion of the whole seems composed of packing peanuts; a miscellany of meaningless material that serves solely to pad out the plot of the laconic Kindle single I was unsurprised, ultimately, to learn Mr Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore began as.

I wanted to love Mr Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, and admittedly, there were bits of it I did, gathered around the outset especially. Additionally, Clay is a great narrator, and most of the story's supporting characters — Ajax and Kat and Mat — are as winning as him. The narrative, however, simply lacks substance... except, I suppose, as an ode to the enduring beauty of Google. And that's not what I come to my speculative fiction for, frankly.

***

Mr Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore
by Robin Sloan

UK Publication: August 2013, Atlantic Books
US Publication: October 2012, Farrar, Straus & Giroux

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