by Isla Lader
…please archive your stories and use another platform
There’s a wonderful Bugs Bunny segment during a run of old Looney Toons sketches. The trickster rabbit is riding a trolley car upon a set of western train tracks. When the tracks begin to run out, Bugs Bunny must aggressively begin placing additional tracks ahead of his speeding cart, doing so comedically, but with a present aura of rapid frustration. He almost seems to realize that his unlimited source of magic is just the hand of a creator having to visually convey the stressful metaphor.
I have found myself in a similar position with the work I’m undertaking with my game rendition to Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast fantasy novel series. As I write scenes through the open source Twine code, I have encountered a snag in the process that has been simultaneously beneficial and infuriating. Coding in the Safari browser may have been a mistake; in the middle of my work I was met was the following message:
Looking at this message and fretting over the transition I would have to do from one browser to the next reminded me of a statement made by novelist and video game creator, Robert Kurvitz, during the final cut of the game he and his team created, Disco Elysium: “Software production is not impossible. It’s not magic. It’s scalable, quantifiable – a beginner can do it. But it’s also meticulous, mentally taxing, and almost psionically psychological work. You have to wield yourself to an improbable degree, like a chess piece. You have to forgive and move on from things it does not feel natural to move on from. And you have to manage an immense amount of fear and paranoia.”
Now, fear and paranoia are inevitably the sensations that arise while I stare at the message above my Twine library. I have only a little over four thousand words dictated, but the amount of coded cells seems more complex. But do not mistake some of these negative emotions for an entirely negative experience. Kurvitz said that you had to forgive and move on, and I do believe he was right.
First, the transfer over of coding from Safari to Firefox has given me the opportunity to do revisions. In a way, I have given myself the gift of a second draft and a second start, without having to entirely start from scratch. Additionally, I have committed to the work of not making this piece of continuation of Titus Groan’s story, but instead an exploration of agency and metatext in the novels and works we have. Therefore the game will instead be a redux.
What’s fascinating about the original work is that as an audience member of the texts we are privy to all the breathings and personifications of Gormenghast. The poetics warn us often and assure us that while we are viewing this place and its denizens–we are still safe from it.
I wondered what it would be like for the characters to have that opportunity, to have the weight of the truth of where they are dawn upon them. That is the goal for the narrative. It’s not a very creative one, but I think it will be interesting and the most fun.
Furthermore, the revisions have given me one of my favorite poetic scenes in the early Fuschia (a playable character) section of the game. I chose Fuchsia and Steerpike as the primary playable characters because they drive the plot in the original works, but they both die on account of their true metatextual purpose being to showcase that Gormenghast is unsavable and that Titus Groan must escape. The objective of the game is to escape the castle as either character. I’ve even mapped a pathway for them both to escape together.
In the original Gormenghast books, Fuschia is a primary character but her fate is sealed by her author on account that she is not the heir to the narrative and that her love is used against her. Additionally, The Thing, a character who is part wild monster and part the descendant of a minor character, is never given dialogue. By having these two characters meet in the game, I have created a potential way for the constructs (the characters) to break the fourth wall and realize that castle Gormenghast is a malevolent force.
This plan is complex enough that a second draft and this move over is necessary and has pointed out a plot hole in how the third segment of this four chapter game will progress.
The following screencaps showcase ways Fuchsia is unique against Steerpike or the castle. Steerpike is unable to conceptualize the world outside of written and planned ambitions. By adding visual elements, I can enhance Fuchsia’s role and her agency in the narrative. I intend to code in more images since the screenshot below looks sadly empty and also does not convey how the reader must scroll further down the page to see the entire artwork piece that Fuchsia has been illustrating.
Additionally, Fuchsia is given the choice to change the seasons, but refuses to do so on account that she loves Autumn. This is another showcase of agency.
The above only came after I began to rapidly transition blocks of code into the new browser. The ideas were stemmed by the ‘forgiveness’ that Kurvitz described.
So here’s to unexpected hurdles and the gifts they give us. As I lay down the tracks rapidly, improvising and meticulously planning, I hope we may all have these moments that could perhaps make something better by the virtue of not everything going exactly on the rails.