#7: Pressure for the engine
“Knowing is not enough, we must apply. Being willing is not enough, we must do.”
Project update
The grant project so far
With the assistance of the lovely Ylaria Rogers of Heart Strings Theatre Company I have now blocked out the first pass of chapters 1-3 of my story, and about half of chapter 4. To be clear, that’s like ‘the first draft of the first draft’, noting that I intend to do 2 passes of all 5 chapters by the end of February. This means I have not yet been writing speech or dialogue for the story, but tailoring the content for which I need to create dialogue to minimise the amount of ‘writing into the void’ and make sure I am targeting my creative energy appropriately. Let’s be very clear: I am a highly verbose writer, and it takes every ounce of restraint that I have not to use 1,000 words when 100 will do. Ultimately, though, this means I have a lot of practice at refinement and iteration; I write 1,000 words, and I pare that down to 100, leaving only what I think is essential. True, I don’t do very much of that in this blog, I free-wheel a great deal, but that is because this is an assessment-free zone, this blog is the subterranean cave of my thoughts whose walls and ceilings will come to be shaped by the long-term erosion of my stream of consciousness. Using verbosity to describe my own verbosity? Nice.
What’s next?
So, chapters 1-4 are blocked out. What next? In the coming week I will block out the final chapter, and then it will be time to perform a review of all 5 chapters from start to finish.
What are you actually doing? Specifically?
I think this week I will give you an insight into the way that I have constructed the parameters I use in this “blocking out”, in case the concept I’m using is a bit hazy. Let’s go!
This project is 1 story made of 5 chapters, divided into 3 acts. How best should I make sure that that 1 story, made up of many many parts, makes good on the promise to the player? A good place to start, naturally, is deciding what the promise is, what the fantasy being played out is. Yes, the game is an allegory for my transgender life experience, but that doesn’t mean that the fantasy is “live the life of a transgender person”. A good example is The Matrix franchise, created by the Wachowski Sisters, which the sisters have specified is a metaphor for the trans experience. Is the fantasy of The Matrix being trans? I don’t think so, the fantasy is being a messianic saviour to the human race, and the promise is that you will experience an intense action movie that is genre-defining. In this way, there are many different angles through which to examine what’s being created.
So, how did I do that? I started with my own vision, mission and goals, which are freely available on my About page, and those parameters determined what I want my game to be, and do. From there, I wrote down a granular description of what I think the game will be, and those parameters are also available down the bottom of the Vessel of Argeus game pitch page. I’ve also drafted a lot of different particulars, such as:
A promise about what the game would be.
What the fantasy of playing the game is.
Some interesting fundamental questions that I want the game to provoke thought about.
A graph of the rise and fall of the emotional trajectory of the story.
An elevator pitch.
The themes I want to emphasise at the overall story level and in each chapter.
The ‘essential experience’ that each chapter should have you feel as a player.
A description of the nature and character of the setting.
A summary of the story.
A list of the locations I imagine the story will take place.
A summary of the content of the introduction and epilogue, the mid-chapter complications, the turning points, the rising tension, the climax and resolution.
A summary of the metaphorical / analogical significance of characters, plot devices and places, to ensure running consistency over the game.
The reality with any writing is that you need to reach the end before you really know how to even start it, so there’s placeholder material, ideas that will definitely change, and so on, but this strategy of documenting strategic information means that then I can more easily move on to examining narrative choices I’m making and asking myself:
Do my choices of location / weather / theme / characters support the stated ‘essential experience’?
Does the way I’ve constructed this chapter support the movement between chapters A and B?
Is the tone and theme of this moment consistent with the overall flow I want for the whole story?
Is there enough happening to hold the player’s attention in this moment?
Does scene A, inspired by my real life, actually support my artistic vision for the game as a literal representation, or is the underlying message better served with a greater level of abstraction?
This isn’t the sum total of everything I’ve been working towards, but this is the type of work that is happening to ‘block out’ what will actually (tentatively) go in the game. The grant is not to finish a script, it is to write a first draft of my script. There will probably be between 3 and 5 drafts between now and completing the game, I would estimate, and a first draft of any script really is just firing a narrative shotgun into a stack of paper and seeing what sticks. I think this is going to be a very good blasting, but the fact remains, the very purpose of a first draft is to get a feel for the voice of the work, and then the most significant part of the work, refining and improving it, can begin.
Personal reflection on stress
Today I started week 3 of year 2 for computer game programming at the AIE, and I’ve been reflecting on a feeling of stress that came up late last week. Is it because I don’t want to be on my course? No. Do I dislike programming? Not at all, I love what I get to do. Do I think the workload is too high already? No, not that either. Why, then, would I have hit the ground running and already felt nearly overwhelmed? I think the answer is high school.
In high school, I struggled with mathematics to such a degree that I would regularly cry out of sheer frustration while trying to do my homework. The moment that mathematics was no longer compulsory, I dropped it - I didn’t take a single maths class in grade 11 or 12 because I felt so traumatised by the experience, and wanted to be rid of it forever. Years later, studying accounting, I routinely experienced this same stress however I had such absolutely wonderful teachers that I suddenly understood the beauty and power of mathematics. I loved it. I thrived, and after graduating from my bachelor’s degree, I even went off to ANU and studied pure mathematics for a year, which required me to get up to speed on everything that I had missed in grade 11 and 12 while learning university maths 101 at the same time. It was wild, but again - great teachers.
So I ask myself now, where is this stress response coming from? It’s certainly not arising because of the AIE teachers, who are wonderful and to whom I am indebted. I find myself thinking that the only place for this emergent stress to be coming from is an echo of my high school days coming back to haunt me - the vulnerability of my own ignorance, the worry about falling behind, or failing, like I did so long ago. I need to remind myself daily that I’m actually chugging along perfectly fine, and keeping up with the expectations of the course, but the background noise in my mind that says “You can’t do this, you don’t know what’s going on” is so loud specifically when it comes to mathematics, that I have to tamp down the doubt every single day. I suppose what I’m trying to say is that I want you to believe in yourself and your ability to achieve the great things you want in life. Every day, I hope that in the morning you wake up and say “I can do this. Yes, I can do this.” Because you can.
For my own life experience, I have found it true that I have to trust the process even when I don’t feel like it. I can only really speak to my own experience, but what I’ve observed in my own life is that when I confront my own ignorance even when it makes me want to cry, I prove to myself that I am making progress. This happens no matter how small the increment, so long as day after day, I keep setting even miniscule achievable goals, over, and over, one by one, brick by brick, I make progress in a battle of inches. Eventually I turn around and look back, and I am so far down the road of learning that I can’t even see where I started anymore. Did I have legs of jelly the whole time? Just about. Did I want to go home and blubber? Sometimes. Regularly, actually. Would I undo it? Certainly not.
I’m not recommending that you push beyond what feels like a healthy limit, but what I am saying is: I believe in you. Take it one moment at a time, and we’ll both be there before you know it.
Games I played (long review)
This week I played The Old City: Leviathan (“Set in a decaying city from a civilization long past, The Old City: Leviathan puts the player in the shoes of a sewer dwelling isolationist“)
This is a complex game to dissect for a number of reasons, and as a game, it warrants an actual write-up, rather than a one-line summary. Long post here!
First, on a literal level, the game is held out to be an amalgamation of waking reality and the dreams of the player character, which adds a surreal quality to the experience and makes the deliberate choice for the player to be an unreliable narrator. The game invites you to embark upon what amounts, to me, as a guided contemplation of philosophy through both conscious and sub-conscious examinations of life.
Second, the player character is anonymous and leaves open the possibility that they could be one of many characters identified throughout the story, and so the unreliable narrator becomes even less reliable. This isn’t a problem per se, and is another conscious choice to deliberately widen the scope of the cognitive biases that might be at play, but there are a lot of those. The descriptions of the characters in this story are all delivered through either the anonymous narrator or a named author who has very strong opinions about the nature of existence and human interaction. Depending on which character the story was told by would shape the way that you interpret the story. This is clearly intentional.
Third, the ‘real’ setting itself, which is to say the mundane alternate earth which hosts the story, makes abundantly clear that the island on which the story takes place has been rendered partially uninhabitable, the consequence of which (and a principal pillar of the story) is that people who drink unfiltered water on the island go insane. These three first elements together, that you play through a combination of the reality and the dreams of an unknown character, on an island that tends to erode one’s reality, combine for a cocktail of magical realism that has me wondering whether they support, or take away from one another. The conclusion on that would be a matter of personal perspective and feeling about whether the game answers questions you find interesting, I suppose.
Fourth, you encounter no other living person throughout the game. Whether this increases or decreases the probability that any one part of the story is real or imagined could go either way. The contemplations of philosophy which are present in the game are delivered as though they have been arrived at through an exhaustive and rigorous process of examination by someone qualified to do so… noting the aforementioned uncertainty about reality, dreams, and sanity. I think this is an interesting observation about the persuasiveness of our own perception and the manner in which we decide (if we do, at all) what constitutes evidence, truth and fact, and it makes for an interesting thought experiment about the human experience. Add to this that all of the characters of interest in the game are isolationists who go months at a time without speaking to another human being. Now, I’m no expert on the psychological impact of isolation on human beings, but I think we can safely chalk that up as a 4th deliberate, complicating vector for the direction of the story’s believability; you must consider the veracity of what you see and hear through 4 different, and partially mutually, exclusive sets of assumptions simultaneously. If that might cause you to have a minor out of body experience, I think that’s the point.
Fifth, the game places a strong emphasis, as far as whoever your anonymous character is concerned, on the importance of different philosophical attitudes to life, but overwhelmingly the one that comes out on top is the player character’s brand of deductive logic, arrived at through introspection and the extrapolation of personal truths, while decrying the existence of emotion. This is delivered as conversational takedowns of major schools of thought on how to approach life by a man who is a self-taught philosopher possessed of biblical negativity toward life and feeling. I found it legitimately troubling to read some of these passages, which will be a familiar feeling to anyone who has ever encountered content which they suspect may be somewhat autobiographical and not wholly fabricated. This game is now 10 years old and this fictional character’s thoughts were not cobbled together by some artificial intelligence - a fellow human being concocted them, and I find myself just a smidge disturbed about that.
To say that this game suggests you should think about “what is life?” is an understatement, I think. The substance of the game is that you should not only question whether or not it is possible to answer “what is real?” but to consider whether it is even a meaningful question in the first place. That’s exactly the kind of thing I like to think about - I like discussions about the importance of definitions, meanings, relating personal experience to one another, and the way in which perception shapes reality. I’m here for it, and I liked the execution of these ideas in the game, notwithstanding the fact if you want to really experience the setting, the game has you reading literally pages and pages of text found in notebooks. I’m not a philosopher per se, I just like thinking about things that make me go “hmmm!”, and that definition varies for everyone, and I have no problem with that. I suspect philosophers with pieces of paper, philosophers who are well-versed in the documented work of other people who have spent their lives pondering very specific academic questions about the nature of existence, will either love or hate this game, precisely because it cannot cause you to come down either in agreement or disagreement; the sheer uncertainty around the characters, setting, and content of the game render it impervious to definitive examination. How do you critique the thinking about thinking about a dream that an insane person might have written, when you aren’t sure who authored that thinking, while trying to identify the person in a lineup, with no certainty about whose name matches whose face, and no guarantee that the author is even present?
My penultimate thought is that a recurring theme of this game is the idea that you can never rule out the possibility that life and existence is a futile and pointless exercise, that life is devoid of meaning. I’m unable to conclude whether the game is trying to teach me something or not, but it feels kind of perfect to have the player undertake a simple exercise of wandering about a space, which then elicits a potentially very complex, intellectually demanding process of consideration about ideas which seem to be completely insoluble because of the complicating factors about the player character (reality, dreams, insanity, isolation). Was the whole exercise itself so tangled as to be pointless? If it was, that would be kind of hilarious, which would impart it with a non-zero sense of value, and no longer be pointless, unless my own feelings of value aren’t valuable… and on and on forever down the infinite regress.
My final thought is that there is one idea in this game I categorically do not like, which is that, left alone, all collective or shared human identities will eventually lead us to conflict with other identities, no matter the content of the underlying ideas. There is a suggestion here that the tribalism of humans will always lead us to war and violence with one another, and even more than that, that all ideologies are equally capable and similarly predisposed to violence. I do not agree with this, and I think it’s demonstrably false. This seems like a very short space in which I will throw my own opinion in here, without even an opportunity to be challenged on it in the context of a review of a game about belief and the value of evidence, but hey… it’s my blog, and here it is: I don’t believe that the destiny of humanity is to rip and tear one another for all time, and I don’t believe that all groups, cultures and identities equally promote violence at any one time.
Textbook learnings
Unreal Engine 5 RPG Development
This week I actually got into playing with the Unreal Engine for only about the second time, learning engine-specific terminology and tools. If you’ve read my blog before, at some point I had a bit of a ramble about Object Oriented Programming, and this week has been yet another refresher on OOP, including its implementation in the Unreal Engine specifically, such as the way in which inheritance and behaviour works between objects. The Unreal Engine mechanism for creating your own standardised objects that you can customise and reuse is called blueprinting.
To use the animal and inheritance metaphor, a blueprint is like DNA; it describes the baseline description for everything that a thing is, and if you use that to create many copies of the same thing, then by default they will be completely identical to one another down to the last detail. The human species, for example, could be described as all being copies of the same blueprint. Humans, though, are different, so what gives? We’re not clonally identical to one another at the level of the whole species. You’d be right, that’s true, and here’s where the utility of OOP comes in - we all have a double-helix spiral DNA structure, which is the blueprint, but every time one of those blueprints gets created, an additional, unique, derived version of the blueprint gets created, which contains all of the multiplicities of variation available to the human DNA structure. The copying in living things isn’t perfect, leading to random mutation which gives rise to the diversity of human beings, but also various other mutations which can terribly complicate our pursuit of carrying on with life without becoming a victim of our own biology.
In this metaphor, blueprinting in Unreal is essentially the promise of perfected DNA reproduction, except because it’s not actually about DNA and it’s just a description of the collection of definitions which make a given thing a thing, it can be applied to anything that can be modelled in 3-dimensional space: people, tables, bodies of water, a hedge maze, whatever you like; it’s all about the underlying thingness of the thing, which you can then decide how, and how many times, you would like to create variants of that thing. Take the human blueprint. Skintone, height, hair length, weight, colour-blindness - all of these things are just variables which, at a given moment in time, can be modelled with colours, integers, trues and falses, every permutation of which may or may not have its own variation. It’s all just about the way in which you gather collections of definitions which distinguish this from that.
I can’t help but feel like Plato and Aristotle would have loved computer programming. Pythagoras’s heart would probably explode with love to know that 2500 years later, the technological spine of 3D computing is triangles.
