THE REMAINS OF THE GAME

reflections on shrapnel



[Do not read this essay unless you've played the game.  It's jam-packed

with spoilers.]



Like Photopia, the initial inspiration for Shrapnel was a Canadian

movie -- this time it was THE HANGING GARDEN, a film not quite in THE

SWEET HEREAFTER's league.  There's a bit in THE HANGING GARDEN where

the protagonist commits suicide at age 15.  But in the main timeline

of the film, he's in his late 20s.  He strolls the grounds of his

parents' house chatting with people and in the background his

adolescent corpse is dangling from a tree branch.



I knew right then that this was a gimmick I would have to use in an IF

game.  You step into the deathtrap, see the *** You have died ***

message, "restart", and try again -- only this time, your corpse is

there to remind you of your past mistake.



Okay.  So, I had a hook.  Unfortunately, I had nothing else, at least

not yet.  What to hang on that hook?



Well, how about a mystery game?  I'd wanted to try different genres,

and it seemed like it might be fun to do a mystery.  I thought of a

Murder on the Orient Express sort of thing, where you're a detective

trying to solve a crime, and you're cooped up with the suspects, and

they *all* did it, and they keep trying to knock you off in different

ways.  Drink the wine, and you're poisoned.  Wander out back, and you

get shot.  Something like that.



Fine.  A reasonable starting point.  Two questions, though: why would

a bunch of different people have wanted to see this victim dead, and

what is the detective doing there?



One way you might get a whole bunch of people all trying to kill you

would be to be an abusive parent with many children.  I saw FESTEN

(translated as THE CELEBRATION) around this time, in which the child

of a respected patriarch takes advantage of his 60th birthday party to

confront him with the years of abuse that led his sister to kill

herself.  This sort of approach seemed very promising, in that it also

fit thematically.  Why would corpses stick around after the game has

been restarted?  As a reflection of the way that the wounds of early

trauma linger on forever after.



Digression: people have remarked on the fact that this is my second

game in a row (9:05 aside) concerned with physical and sexual abuse

of children.  I freely admit that my treatment of the issue in these

games is far from masterful, but let me also assure everyone that I'm

not just using these themes as a way to add power to a storyline -- to

sucker-punch the audience, as some have put it in the past.  The reason

I find myself returning to this issue is because I increasingly think

it is The Issue of our time, maybe of all time.  The more I hear, the

more convinced I am that this sort of thing is pandemic; Lloyd deMause

asserts that 45% of boys and 60% of girls are abused before they reach

maturity, but my impression is that those numbers are, if anything,

low.  It's the sort of thing where you look at the world around you

and you either just shut down or try to come to grips with it, and

writing is part of my attempt to do the latter.  End of digression.



So, who should the PC be?  If the murder takes place at a dinner party,

it could be a random guest... but that didn't seem to make sense.  If

the now grown-up children have a specific grievance -- the suicide of

one of their number, for instance -- and elect to take matters into

their own hands, fine, but that doesn't make them *generally* murderous;

why would they be trying to kill the detective?  The whole scheme also

didn't seem to work in modern times -- you'd have to prevent the PC

from making a phone call, or just driving away... the more I thought

about it, the more I decided that the game would have to be set before

1920.  Then I thought, okay, how about the South in the late 19th

century?



And with that thought, I suddenly stopped thinking of the project as a

mystery at all, and decided that instead I wanted to make a Faulknerian

family drama out of it.  I also didn't want the father to be a stock

villain -- he ought to have reasons for acting the way he acts aside

from "he's just evil".  Why would he be so abusive?  Generally, people

are abusive because they themselves have been abused and then perpetuate

the cycle: that is, they're in pain, and they lash out.  So let's say

that the patriarch in the game is in pain.  Since it's the South in the

19th century, why not from a lingering Civil War wound?  And then I got

to thinking about the isolation of the household and the atrocities

therein, and how the ideology that "a man's home is his castle" mapped

onto the Southern states' assertion that the federal government had no

right to poke around inside their borders, and this too seemed quite

promising.



It was at around this point that I thought, so, we've got this isolated

house out in the woods... wait, hang on a minute, an isolated house out

in the woods? in a piece of IF?  Okay, then, it's *got* to be the Zork

house.  When I decided to start the player off west of a white house I

giggled for quite some time.  Furthermore, mapping the story onto the

Zork geography lent the game structure and even some content -- I

needed some fearsome creature to put in the basement, and a brain-

damaged child seemed like an appropriately Faulknerian touch.



There was even a path into the forest, a perfect place for the Civil

War scene I wanted to include.  But here, again, things started to

morph a bit.  At this point I was thinking that the game would be

called Remains, for two reasons: by the end of the game, you'd be

hip-deep in your own remains, and also, key moments from the past

(like the suicide of the youngest daughter, or the artillery attack

where the patriarch gets wounded) would remain for you to observe

firsthand.  But I also planned on making this an occasional phenomenon

in an otherwise solid stretch of space-time.  I certainly didn't plan

on coming up with any sort of explanation for the quirks other than

the metaphorical one.  But...



...well, I still didn't have an ending.  So the PC -- a business

partner of the patriarch character, say -- comes to the house, gets

killed a few times while discovering that the kids have killed their

father, learns why, and... then what?  Do they let him go?  Maybe a

cop shows up at the door and the player has to decide whether to turn

in the children.  And maybe that would in fact have made for a better

game.  Except that suddenly I knew how I wanted it to end.



I was thinking about the whole "past sticks around" theme, and in a

flash it came to me that the game really had to end with the bits of

the past becoming more and more fragmentary before dissolving into

random characters and dumping out to the command line.  That didn't

really fit the game I had in mind, but I wanted to use that gimmick

so much that I decided to change the game to fit.  So now the shattered

timeline was going to be front and center -- every time you make a

move, you don't know if you're jumping back or forward in time, and

occasionally bits of other pieces of the timeline will blow by like a

tumbleweed or crash through like a wrecking ball... I wasn't really

reading the thread about Jigsaw and spacetime, but I was aware of it

(yes, Whitman and Blake were oblique Jigsaw references), and while

Graham Nelson had used the onset of chaos as a way to end a play-through

of the game, I started to think that maybe my game should take place in

the moments after the onset of chaos but before it ravages the timeline

into static.



William Sleator had a book called Strange Attractors published in 1990

that dealt with this sort of thing -- the protagonist spends a few

chapters in mild spacetime chaos, characters blipping in and out, his

surroundings morphing around him... but it wasn't very satisfying.

This was the sort of thing where conveying the *experience* of the

phenomenon was key -- to actually have to deal with the blipping and

morphing oneself, rather than passively watching someone else do it.

And turning vicarious experience of a fictional world into firsthand

experience is one of IF's greatest strengths.  Strange Attractors was

Sleator's second time-travel book; the first, The Green Futures of

Tycho, was a landmark book for me (I read it when I was nine and it

blew my mind) and so when I needed a name for my 22nd-century character

the answer was obvious.



So now I had a game that was a mystery *and* a family drama *and* a

reconsideration of Zork *and* a piece of sci-fi.  (I know aficionadoes

hate the phrase "sci-fi", but this aspect of the game is cheesy enough

that it's the only term that really fits.)  This is normally the point

at which one generally ought to step back and say, whoa, too much going

on here, time to start separating out some elements for other works...

but perversely, I got it into my head to start cramming in *more* ideas.

The title of the game was going to be Remains -- how about adding a

third reason for that, to wit: it's the remains of fifty different

game ideas?  Also, I like the idea of the left turn.  That is, I like

it when a book or a song or a movie comes off like it's going to be

about one thing, then veers off in another direction altogether.  At

least, I like it in theory; in practice, it's hard to pull off.  (One

work that did pull it off beautifully is John Sayles's movie LIMBO,

which at first looks like a warmed-over, transplanted LONE STAR before

something happens to totally change our interpretation of that portion

of the film.)  So the fact that this game looked like it was going to

jump tracks into another tone and style at the end didn't really

concern me; if anything, it sounded like fun.



So what other ideas could I add?  How about some stuff about the

nature of the player/PC relationship?  I had some thoughts on the

matter that I'd been batting around for quite some time -- one of them

ended up turning into 9:05, and a few others ended up in this game.

What would it be like to play an insane person?  One answer was offered

in the form of Cody Sandifer's game George, in which you play someone

whose pathological impulses manifest themselves in the form of an

imaginary friend who does stuff you don't necessarily want to do, like

steal wallets; but to my way of thinking, this seemed almost backwards.

Why have the PC hear voices from an NPC telling him what to do, when

he *already* hears and obeys commands from an outside source -- the

player?  Like the 9:05 idea, this too seemed like an idea belonging to

a different game (already thoroughly planned out, but difficult to

implement -- look for it in a few years) but it did direct me toward the

twist I did choose to add.  A characterized PC is by its very nature a

split personality, as the character's personality shapes the form that

actions will take (does >KISS SVEN result in a peck on the cheek, a

thorough snog, or nothing more than a one-liner and a blush?) while

the actions themselves are mostly determined by the player's own

personality (are you the sort to try kissing and killing everyone?)

But what if the PC is already a split personality, with two halves

waxing and waning, the half in charge generally directed by the

recessive half, but vaguely conscious of that direction and occasionally

overriding it for extended periods?  So, yeah, you'd be playing the

patriarch's business partner, as I'd sort of planned all along, but

that "business partner" would be firmly lodged inside the head of the

father himself, explaining why the various kids try to kill you on

sight.  Everything seemed to click into place.



Messing around with the text flow (frequent pauses, clearing of the

screen) was something I'd been wanting to try for a while; I spent an

inordinate amount of time wondering whether Hunter in Darkness would

have benefited from a pause just before one particular sentence.  This

I don't think of as just a gimmick, but rather as a tool that could be

useful in all sorts of games (though admittedly overused in this one.)

I also found the realtime stuff to be great fun, though I imagine it to

be of limited use in most cases.  (I don't like the idea of racing

through a text game against the clock -- I'm a slow reader.  But for

special effects, it's way cool.)



One gimmick was added in beta: Tycho Green's infodump was made optional.

This really didn't do much to resolve the essentially objectionable

nature of infodumps, but I figured it'd at least be interesting to see

if those who complain about having everything spelled out would be able

to resist the offer to have everything spelled out.  Did *anyone* say

no?  I suspect people want to see as much of the game text as they can,

even if they're pretty much warned in advance that it could compromise

the effect of the story.  This isn't a criticism.



At this point, the game (retitled Shrapnel at great expense and at the

last minute) probably sounds like I made some soup, added a pinch of

this and a dash of that for flavor, then tumbled down a slippery slope

and ended up dumping in the entire contents of my spice rack.  That's

just about right.  What's more, that's not even the game's greatest

flaw.  If I had to single out the most glaring weakness in the game,

it wouldn't be the number of ingredients -- chucking the kitchen sink

into the stockpot was the whole idea, after all -- but rather the fact

that everything else has been boiled down so the spices are all that's

left.  The game's too small.  The children get a couple of lines apiece.

The PC's mutiny against the player's orders lasts for the length of one

cut-scene.  Some of this owes to my schedule -- the time I could afford

to allot to writing IF ran out in mid-February -- but I think most of

it comes from just-in-time content.  Let me explain.



Scott McCloud identifies artwork as being composed of six elements:

idea, form, idiom, structure, craft, and surface.  All are important,

but the raison d'etre of a particular project should fall somewhere in

the first two categories: "Does the artist want to say something about

life *through* his art [idea] or does he want to say something about

art itself? [form]"  Choosing idea means that "'telling the story' (or

in the case of non-fiction, 'delivering the message') takes priority

over invention."  This was certainly the path I took with my novel.

But with Shrapnel, I chose form.  McCloud: "By choosing form, he'd be

setting up to become an explorer.  His goal: to discover all that the

art form is capable of.  And his art would not lack for ideas or for a

purpose.  His art would just *become* his purpose and the ideas would

arrive in time to give it substance."



This essay has been a chronicle of waiting for the ideas to arrive so

I could flesh out the innovations I wanted to implement; however, I

don't think I allowed these ideas sufficient gestation time, and instead

just hurriedly plugged them in to meet my self-imposed deadline.  That's

not how I work best.  Photopia was a similar rush job, but there the

content had been floating around in my head for a while, looking for a

place where it might fit; Shrapnel's content was all-new and thus fairly

cursory.  What I ended up with was, in my opinion, a fairly interesting

exploration of some of IF's possibilities, but not a really satisfying

game.



So then the question was, should I release it?  I could have sat on it

for a year or two and tried to flesh it out to a full-length piece, but

I wasn't especially motivated to do that -- realistically, my choices

were to release it pretty much as-is, or scrap it.  And in the end,

after asking around and thinking about it for myself, I decided that

hey, some of my favorite songs appeared only as B-sides to singles or

on movie soundtracks, having been declared by the artists in question

to be unworthy of inclusion on a real album; if even a couple of people

genuinely enjoy the game as much as I enjoy those songs, doesn't that

make it worth releasing?  And in fact I've received some extremely kind

comments on it -- it seems to have really worked for some people, which

pleases me tremendously.



There now, doesn't Tycho Green look awfully succinct by comparison?



  -----

 Adam Cadre, Sammamish, WA

 17 February 2000