the Photopia Phaq, v2.1 (warning: only read this if you've already played the game) Q: So. I-0 ends with a plug for your upcoming game Pantheon, which was never released. What ever happened to that? A: I started in on Pantheon toward the end of '97, and even sent out a working version for beta testing. But even by the beginning of '98 I knew that I wanted to retool the concept. Also, I had an idea for a comp game that I was eager to begin working on. Q: Photopia? A: Varicella. Q: So why didn't that come out until 1999? A: Jonesboro, Arkansas. A couple kids opened fire on their classmates, which just so happens to be how my novel ends. Right then I knew I had to finish the novel before the bookstores filled up with stories about school shootings. So I didn't work on any IF at all until I finished the novel in early July. Q: So why didn't you go back to Varicella at that point? A: A couple of reasons. One, the idea sort of outgrew the bounds of the comp; two, I figured that my chances of finishing Photopia by the deadline were better than those of finishing Varicella on time. Q: So you'd already thought up Photopia? A: Sort of. The name came first: in early '96, I was taking a class for which we watched some Doris Day movie, and the prof handed out photocopies of an old magazine with an article about it. The magazine was called, I thought, PHOTOPIA. I thought that was a cool neologism. Then I realized, wait - that's not an I... that's an L! "PHOTOPLA"? No, the last letter had been cropped. It was PHOTOPLAY. So "Photopia" was all mine. Later I discovered that some company had already trademarked that word. Fortunately, I wasn't distributing my program through Cascade Mountain Publishing, so I didn't have to change the title to "Alley Dawson: Mostly Dead" or anything like that. Q: So you had a title. When did you find something to attach it to? A: Not for a while. At first I thought I wanted to do something that was in large part a strategy game - that you'd have these colored discs that you had to deploy somehow, making sure you had the right one in the right place and so on. Then, in April, I saw THE SWEET HEREAFTER. Q: And what's that? A: One of my favorite movies. Q: What's it about? A: Babysitters and bus crashes. Q: Ah, so you're a plagiarist. A: That's not a question. But yeah, I was heavily influenced by THE SWEET HEREAFTER. I probably took the babysitter bit from it (though I'd been wanting to do something with babysitters before I saw it, and please don't take that out of context.) More to the point, seeing it made me think, wait, I don't want to do another wacky adventure featuring a player character with some rather extreme behavior right now; I want to try something literary and beautiful. I also hoped that releasing two works as different as I-0 and Photopia would mean that from then on, people wouldn't know what to expect when I announced a new piece of IF. Q: What other influences were at work as you wrote Photopia? A: Christopher Priest - not the British one - was a big influence. He used to be known for smart and funny dialogue, nuanced characters, and offbeat endings - and rightly so - but in the '90s he became even better known for the "Priest plot," a type of storytelling in which not only is chronology mixed up, but at the beginning, you don't even really know what you're looking at as you read... but gradually you piece together who the characters are, what the events you've just witnessed mean, and by the end of the story, you can't imagine it any other way. The details have been related in exactly the right order for maximum effect. And whenever the issue of linearity has came up on the newsgroup, I thought of Priest: from one perspective, his stories are completely linear - it's static fiction, the reader can't affect the story except by turning the page - but from another, they could scarcely be less linear. But how to build a story from the accumulation of carefully arranged vignettes in IF? Photopia was in part an attempt to answer that question. Another influence was Robert C. O'Brien. Most people know him from MRS. FRISBY AND THE RATS OF NIMH, but I was mainly thinking of his book A REPORT FROM GROUP 17 as I wrote Photopia. In this book, a twelve-year-old girl gets kidnapped, and it happens very close to the beginning - O'Brien has all of a paragraph or two to make us care about her before the kidnapping happens. And he does. How? By presenting her through the eyes of her worshipful five-year-old brother. I used this technique often in the story: Alley is only seen through the eyes of people who adore her - her parents, Wendy, Jonathan, the Mackayes. And I also got to do something O'Brien couldn't: I got to arrange things so that the player adopted the personae of those who cared about her. The player, if I did my job right, never thinks, "Hmm... is this Alley all she's cracked up to be?" the way an outside observer might; Alley's *your* daughter, *your* babysitter, *your* junior-high crush. The girl in GROUP 17 was named Alison; Alison also struck me as a sort of archetypically Canadian name, and I wanted Alley's name to have a Canadian feel to it. Partly because THE SWEET HEREAFTER was a Canadian film, and partly because I'd just read a book that was in part about Canada World Youth and Katimavik, and thought I'd put Alley in such a program. So much as I'd ripped off the name "Dorado" from R.A. Montgomery for I-0, I did the same here for "Turtalia": just as my Dorado is the state which might have been had Gadsden purchased land with an outlet to the Gulf of California, my Turtalia is the state which might have existed had the US actually fought for 54-40. Hence the use of the metric system and the lack of the extraneous "u" in "color". Q: What about the various colored scenes? A: In the back of my mind I'd wanted to try a fantasy game, just because for the most part I hate fantasy; I get a little kick out of taking genres that strike me as unappealing and trying to find a way to make them work for me. So I'd been collecting ideas for what I could put into my fantasy piece - ideas that seemed to fit the genre but with no elves, orcs, wizards or any of that. Everything fell into place once I realized that if I used the title "Photopia", I could associate each fantasy scene with a color; each one could be part of a continuing story, the same story Alley would be telling Wendy; I could include "real life" scenes to show where Alley got the idea for each one; and then the final scene would be Alley in her crib, looking at her multicolored mobile. One theme I wanted to address in the colored scenes was the barrenness of most IF locations. There's a reason why most places in IF are so empty, why no matter where you are - a dungeon, a space station, an entire city or world - chances are it'll turn out to have been long abandoned. To wit: characters are hard to code. I thought it'd be interesting to play with that theme a bit, to justify the inevitable barrenness, and luckily, I had a perfect explanation at hand: the places of the story mirror Alley's life. The colony on the red planet (not necessarily Mars, you'll note) had so much potential, but something went wrong early on and snuffed it out before it had a chance - just like Alley. This is a theme that I've had something of a personal stake in since my sister's death. Q: That's not really what I meant, though. Where did you rip off the ideas for each colored scene from? A: Well, only one of them was borrowed directly from other sources. The idea for the sky-blue puzzle came from Ron Hansen's MARIETTE IN ECSTASY, in which two sisters play a little game: "You're in a locked room. How do you get out?" "Call for help." "No one hears you." "Look for a key." "There is none." "Dig under the walls." "The ground is too hard." "I give up." "The room has no ceiling. And you have wings." I thought this would make a cool IF puzzle. But just leaving the player in a chamber didn't seem satisfactory: without anything to do, the player might well get frustrated (cf. The Persistence of Memory). It occurred to me that this would work even better as a maze. I had already decided to submit PHOTOPIA under a pseudonym, and to make the deception less transparent, I decided to give that pseudonym a bit of a history by putting out a chicken-comp game under the name I would be using, Opal O'Donnell. I even wrote the chicken-comp game to use the same puzzle, so people would be more inclined to believe that "she" had written it. Q: Why the pseudonym? A: I wanted my entry to be anonymous - partly to avoid people with axes to grind, but mainly so that people wouldn't get distracted expecting this story to be anything like I-0. The last thing I wanted was for players to spend half an hour trying to get Wendy to undress. I also didn't want people to spend time guessing who wrote it - again, partly because I expected they'd figure it out fairly easily, but mainly because I didn't want it to be an issue. The awkward thing is that I went to such lengths to establish Opal as a real person, making "her" an ifMUD account and everything, that it was years before I disclosed that "she" was just a pseudonym. I probably wouldn't have bothered except that it started to bother me that v1.0 of the Phaq had lies in it. Q: In any event, you didn't finish answering the questions. Where did you get the ideas for the other scenes? A: The purple scene was primarily inspired by Neal Stephenson's THE DIAMOND AGE, in which a young girl named Nell has a "primer" which teaches her life lessons, using four characters to do so: Dinosaur, Duck, Peter and Purple. But only the first three are actually involved in the lessons - lessons in self-defense, in avoiding treachery, in table manners, that kind of thing. At one point one character points out that Purple - the only human one - just sort of stands around. "What's *she* do?" the character asks. Replies another character, "Nothing yet. I suspect she'll have plenty to teach Nell once she hits adolescence." But Stephenson skips that part! We get excruciating detail about the Castle Turing - but Purple vanishes without a trace. It sucked! So when I settled on the color scheme, I knew that the purple scene was going to involve a young woman in purple with something to teach Alley. Q: That scene also is completely non-interactive. Why? A: A few reasons. One, I decided that Alley was going to be the one character that you yourself didn't play. She's 100% NPC. Also, my original plans called for interactivity in the purple scene, but for it to be told in the first person, since Alley's relating her own dream... but I discovered there was no way I'd be able to do something as complicated as equipping the program to make that kind of switch in midstream and still get the entry in on time. And since I'd also originally planned for all the real-life scenes to be non- interactive, and unfold exactly like the purple scene does, complete with ersatz >DO THIS messages, but then scrapped the idea since I figured that it'd make for a weaker work and that people wouldn't like it, I thought I'd resurrect the idea for that one scene, partly just to see what people thought. One more note on the purple scene. As noted, it was inspired by the fact that Neal Stephenson cut Purple's lessons from THE DIAMOND AGE. Those lessons no doubt dealt with the onset of sexual maturity. Alley is not quite thirteen at the time of her death; that is to say, she's more than old enough for this to have become part of her life. So I had a "real life" scene, linked to the purple scene much as the swimming pool scene is linked to the sea-blue scene or the astronomy scene is linked to the gold scene, in which the astute player could have picked up subtle clues that yes, Alley is far from unaware of her sexuality. And, in the end, I cut it: it threw off the pacing. How's that for irony? Q: Yeah, it's like ray-ee-ain on your wedding day. A: Here's another idea I ended up scrapping: at one point, I'd planned for half the scenes to feature Alley at later points in her life. I had a scene with her in college, and another where she's got a kid of her own. And at the end the player would realize, wait, those were scenes which could have been, but now never will be. But I ended up not using that idea, figuring it'd be too confusing for most players. Q: That's nice. So you *still* haven't finished answering the question - where did the other four colored scenes come from? A: The forest scene came from my trips to the actual Petrified Forest in Arizona - I almost spent $150 on a beautiful piece of malachite, but decided I couldn't afford it. The berry-eating wolf came straight out of a dream I had. And the weather salesman came from a misheard lyric. The Offspring have a song called "Change the World" which begins, "I see the way the salesmen stare into the sun." But for the longest time I thought it was, "I see the weather salesman stare into the sun." And I thought, a weather salesman! That's a cool idea! Then, when I discovered that wasn't the line at all, I figured I'd keep an eye out for a place to stick a weather salesman into a story. Photopia had a place for him, and there you have it. The beach of gold was an idea I'd had ever since I was six, when I read in Carl Sagan's COSMOS that gold was formed in supernovae. That book and TV series also sparked my interest in Mars - hell, it sparked my interest in everything. Pretty much any sense of wonder I may have is derived from that book. Carl Sagan was also a big influence on my prose style - COSMOS was the first book I read that made me really aware that paragraphs don't just happen but are wrought objects. Around the time of his death in 1996, I read many testimonials from people who said that Carl Sagan's work had been what prompted them to go into science. I didn't go into science. But Carl Sagan's work is a big part of what prompted me to become a writer. Q: And what about the undersea castle? A: Saw one in a fishbowl once. Q: One thing a lot of people have remarked about is the dynamic mapping in the castle and on the red planet. Why'd you do that? Just for the fun of it? A: No - it wasn't fun. I did it, as is my wont, through brute force: most of the code in the comp release is the series of switch statements that form the map of the red planet. I got one digit wrong - put a 4 where a 5 was supposed to go - and bang, there's your power plant bug. I didn't do a lot of planning before I started coding. I knew I had about six weeks to bang out this program, and had to start as soon as possible. I didn't even know the order of all the scenes when I started; at the time I started coding, I only had things planned out through sea-blue. The rest I arranged on the fly. So when I was ready to start layout out the red planet, I initially started with a conventional 5x5 map, and started coming up with different layouts for where things should go. I knew that I wanted lots of broken pieces of construction equipment scattered about - in fact, the idea of an abortive space colony came about as a result of trying to figure out a plausible reason to have broken pieces of construction equipment everywhere. Why? Because there just so happen to be a bunch of broken-down bulldozers and cranes and such in the otherwise quite Edenic photos that Jock Sturges took in far northern California in the '80s. When I first got to know his work it was wonderfully jarring to see the prelapsarian Misty Dawn hanging out in the middle of the Klamath National Forest with trees and rocks and a raging river - and the rusted cab of some old dump truck. So I started picking places on the map for the broken construction equipment, more or less at random... but then it occurred to me, wait, this is a story that Alley is telling. So Wendy should discover things in Alley's chosen order no matter which compass direction she selects. So the dynamic mapping was prompted by the storyline, not the other way around. Q: Speaking of static vs. dynamic, why tell this as IF at all? Why not regular prose fiction? It's certainly linear enough. A: True, the player has little power to affect the events of the story. But it was crucial to me, was in a sense the whole point of the piece, that the player *inhabit* the places of the story. In the "real life" sections, I wanted to provide the experience of hanging out with this kid, to the extent I could; in the bedtime- story sections, it was vital that the player be the one wandering around in the various strange locales of the tale. Frankly, there's not enough to them to be worth experiencing them secondhand. I came up with these places, and I wanted to plop the player down in them just long enough to look around, say "Whoa, neat," and then move on. Rockvil in the third person would have been a fourth-rate dystopia; being there was what made it so chilling. An author can incarnate a place in IF in a way that's not possible in other media. So if incarnating places is the point of what the work is trying to achieve - which, in this case, the colored sections of the story were - then IF is the way to go. Q: Okay, so here's the biggie. What does Photopia mean? What's the message? A: Interpreting the story is the players' job, not mine. Some of the discussion I've read - that of what the seed pod might symbolize, for instance - races far ahead of where my conscious mind was at the time I wrote it. This delights me to no end. But I will point out one thing that was on my mind, which only crystallized for me after rereading Geoff Ryman's wonderful novel WAS - a book which, like Photopia, features numerous focal characters, skips around in time, place and perspective, and dwells on how elements of a story have been influenced by events in the lives of the tellers. It also deals with the vicious cycle of abuse, in which being treated cruelly turns children into hateful people, which in turn leads others to treat them cruelly, which makes them still more hateful, and on and on and on... and leads them to introduce cruelty into the lives of others, who are transformed into abusers in turn... but there's a flip side. I mentioned earlier that one of the tricks I picked up was to present Alley through the eyes of those who adored her. And she's a wonderful kid, and worthy of adoration. Why? How did she come to turn out that way? I would argue that it was in large part *because* she was adored. If you get to them early enough, being treated lovingly can turn children into lovable people. So while the death of a loved child is tragic, the life of an unloved child is more tragic still. This is a bigger theme than Photopia manages to get across, but it's in its DNA somewhere.