Boing Boing » Tom Chatfield

An interview with China Miéville

Tom Chatfield — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 03:30:42 +0000

China Miéville is one of the most important writers working in Britain today. The author of ten novels of "weird fiction"—as well as short stories, comics, non-fiction, a roleplaying game, and academic writing on law and ideology—his 2011 science fiction novel Embassytown was acclaimed by Ursula K le Guin, among others, as "a fully achieved work of art" busy "bringing the craft of science fiction out of the backwaters".

We share the same British publisher, Pan Macmillan, and so—ahead of the publication on May 24 of his newest book, Railsea, a fantastical novel set in a world whose "seas" are an endless web of railway lines—I spent an hour with him discussing fiction, fantasy, giant moles, and the limits of contemporary geekdom.

Tom Chatfield: Perhaps because it's written with a teen audience in mind, Railsea seemed to have elements of a fable to me: a lot of stark, archetypical images, from the vision of this endless tangled sea of railway lines to the layered geography of the planet and the amazing beasts flying, crawling and digging through it: monstrous moles the size of houses, so-called "angels", and so on. It made we wonder what the seed of the book was.

China Miéville: I think you're right about Railsea having a more fabular register, partly because it is a book written for younger readers, albeit older readers than [my 2007 novel for young adults] Un Lun Dun. And while on the whole I'm quite sceptical of fabular logic, it does allow you certain things. If you are telling something which has a fable element, it's always on some level a tale twice told. And in this particular book, there is a narratorial voice which periodically interrupts and is telling a story. That can be mannered and awful and winsome; but it can work, sometimes.

Railsea does also, I hope, have that epic, mythological element, in the way that something like Melville's Moby Dick does, which is obviously a big point of reference. So everything is simultaneously itself but also larger than itself.

In terms of the genesis of the book, I can't remember precisely. I think it had an epiphanic moment. But what I'm aware of is a couple of things. One is the very, very silly joke that I've always liked burrowing monsters—Tremors, Burrowers—and I've always loved Moby Dick, and at some point I was amused by the idea of the ridiculous semiotic pun of thinking of Moby Dick but with giant moles instead of whales.

For a long time, too, I've liked the idea of trains as sort of anti-ships. Because the idea of a ship is that it's unconstrained, whereas a train is so constrained; and so I liked the idea of inverting that traditional notion of the rail as a rigidly determined path.

The funny thing is that there is a tradition of railways fiction that does exactly this. We are so steeped in the tradition of railways as a single line cutting through the wilderness. But if, for example, you read Stefan Grabinski or you read Bruno Schultz, there is this beautiful rumination on the sidings of history. Pynchon also has that thing of thinking of time as a proliferation of lines. So there is a tradition you can tap into that completely inverts what has become the cliché, and focuses instead on branching lines, on sidings, on reversibility and on the breaching of timetables—and you end up with a notion of rails that can be an ineffable symbol of potentiality. I liked the idea of trying to honour that alternative tradition.

But that's all post-facto to the basic gag—and it is a gag—of someone shouting "there she blows!" and it's a mole, not a whale.

Tom: Like the taxonomy of whales in Melville's Moby Dick—or like the bestiaries in Dungeons & Dragons, which I know you played when growing up—you do explicitly give us an itemized book of monsters, complete with pictures, in Railsea. This seems to be of a piece with your fiction, in that it's above all about the concrete: cool monsters; detailed, tactile worlds. There's a kind of imaginative over-fecundity that goes with that, which I love in your writing: part of the aesthetic seems to be having things which are totally extraneous to any conceivable plot, just for their own sake.

So in a different kind of science fiction book to Railsea, it might have been a big "reveal" that the source of much of the technology and nature on this planet is debris left behind by visiting alien races long ago. But for you, all the characters know this already, and it's just part of the background to this crammed imagined world—no big deal.

China: I love that point—and I think that it has more than one response. For one thing, you're absolutely right in terms of the privileging of the concrete. For me, one of the main things about the fantastic is that it portends all kinds of things, but it is also always itself. So the difference between a fantasy novel and a rather heavy-handed magic realist novel is that in the magic realist novel, the dragon represents whatever it may be—hope, despair—while in the fantasy novel it represents whatever it may be and it's also a giant fucking scaly lizard.

So there is partly just the joy of that creation. And I also think that I have tried to instrumentalize a certain lack of aesthetic discipline in my own approach to writing. I like this stuff, and I would rather put it in than not have it in. The whole kind of "kill your darlings" cliché of writing is a very good injunction—but at the same time, sometimes I think, well, actually, let that darling live.

As a writer, my assumption is that my own obsessions are for the most part quite obvious and predictable. And I say this with a melancholy shrug, in the sense that I am a 39-year-old leftist British geek who grew up—just like millions of others—on 2000 AD, Dungeons and Dragons, the anti-apartheid movement, anti-Thatcherite politics, pulp science fiction and Dr Who. It's a combination that's very well-worn, and this means that my assumption is that anything I can think of is probably (a) something lots of other people are thinking of, and (b) not that surprising.

There is a particular mode of writing among other people that always makes me roll my eyes, particularly in the fantastic, and that's the "ta-da!" reveal of something very obvious. That's why, taking your example, the revelation of the ancient aliens in Railsea is really done in passing.

But I would go further, and would put a little tiny spoiler warning on this: I think that the end of Railsea is fucking obvious too. And not only is it pretty obvious, but one character says to the other, "you knew this was going to happen."

I don't think this is necessarily a crisis or a problem—you can find ways to negotiate it with a certain good humour and narrative élan. The problem comes if you think that, in the revelation, you have done the job.

Tom: It feels to me that the way many of your characters behave encodes this approach. So, in bad writing, there are several false-feeling ways characters can behave. There's the "literary" bad approach, where characters behave like the mindless agents of a beautiful prose style that's more interested in itself than in anything else. And then there's the kind of bad writing you were touching on when you mentioned magical realist fiction, where this twinkly fairy appears in a desert, and it exists only to perform symbolic actions that the author has decided are deeply meaningful.

But then there is the case when the characters seem aware not only of their own situation, but also of your situation, as an author, and they can effectively help you out. So in your writing, in Un Lun Dun for example, there's that moment when Deeba—a character we think is going to be the heroine's sidekick—looks through the index of a fictional book and finds herself listed there under the heading "sidekicks". She's "the funny one"—she isn't even given a proper name—and she complains pretty loudly about this.

Similarly, in Railsea, it feels like some of your characters have themselves read a book very like Moby Dick, and are much more aware than you might expect of the additional layers of meaning being attached to their actions. So they actually talk about having a "philosophy" embodied in the quest to search after huge beasts that they've designated as their special enemies—and they discuss what it means to have a philosophy, its limitations, and so on.

There's a momentum encoded in this kind of character that makes me feel that you, as a writer, can almost trust them to extricate your imagination from predictability and those naff "ta-da!" moments.

China: You're certainly saying the kind of things I would desperately want people to think. I'm not saying that you can never surprise your readers. But I am saying that a lot of the things that writers seem to think of as surprising often aren't.

In a sense, we've all read a lot of narrative, and narrative is quite a simple thing. In fact, the whole "spoiler alert" thing—and I'm pro spoiler alerts—is something we do despite knowing that if, for example, there's a gun on the mantelpiece in a story, someone is either going to get shot or, if the writer is being a bit radical, someone is pointedly not going to get shot. Those are the only choices, and we can guess both of them, so the end is already spoilt.

One of the reasons I like writing books for younger readers is that I feel more licence to explicitly state some of those things, because the meta-level is more playfully engaged. Although in [my 2011 novel] Embassytown there is also a lot of engagement with these questions of narrative, surprise, and this being a story.

Tom: In Embassytown, I think you actually get your own characters to say, "you realise this is impossible?" about the circumstances they're in...

China: Yes, quite. And I'm okay with this. There is a lot of dystopian young adult fiction out at the moment—some of it very good—but a lot of it revolves around some form of the ending of Planet of the Apes: oh my god, you did it, damn you all, etc. And we all know. We all know that, somewhere, the fucking State of Liberty is poking out from the sand. So let's move on from there.

Tom: You could call this a paradox of genre realism. All fiction is ultimately formulaic, so only fiction that's willing to acknowledge that it's formulaic is actually in a position to go through this into being realistic again. Often, literary fiction invites you to collude in this pretence that you don't know exactly what's going to happen, what's going on—and this can get in the way of having some genuine and unaffected emotion, and being honest about enthusiasms and limitations. Instead, both you and the author are busy playing this game that says we're all too marvellous and sophisticated to acknowledge that narrative has rules and formulae.

China: I wouldn't go for the word "formulaic," because I think that's quite harsh. But what I would say is "structured by protocols". The vast majority of fiction certainly is structured like this. Even genuinely, wildly avant garde stuff has its own protocols. So you do have to start from that position.

Then the way you relate to those protocols and that structure is up to you. If you don't want to fall into despair, you have to cheerfully accept it as a norm and move on. But also—and I say this a little more tentatively, because I dislike very much the self-congratulation that can take place within genre fiction—my sense is that, at the moment, there is a little more space for this moving on within the best genre fiction than within the mainstream of "literary" fiction: a bit less anxiety about protocols and structures. And that gives me a certain hope.

Tom: It seems to me that it's about what tools you have at your disposal for engaging with the present—and that a besetting sin for much contemporary writing is a lack of urgency. Which ties in with the question of where urgency comes from, given that each era has its own structural problems, and grappling with the present is a difficult thing. We're a very individualistic age—and perhaps this makes it very useful to be able to tap unashamedly into group and minority obsessions.

China: One has to tread cautiously, because what we are partly doing is the usual geek trick of self-validation: of validating the geekocracy by stressing that our own fascinations are what make everything work. Having said which, I don't disagree with you, and I think that obsession and passion—any kind of passion, really, meaning seeing the world through a particular prism—are invaluable and one of the most interesting, if fraught and dangerous, ways to live.

Do you remember, years ago, Channel 4 had a programme that Jon Ronson used to present that was on really late at night, called "For the Love Of…," and all he would do is sit down at a table with a group of enthusiasts, and they would just talk for a couple of hours? One week, it was model train enthusiasts, the next week tropical fish. He would just be this ingénue, and he would get them to talk, get into arguments, the micro-politics. And it was intoxicating to watch—even/especially if you didn't know anything about the particular obsession.

The other thing I remember is that, me and my mum, one of the things we used to talk about was a love of specialist magazines. You'd go to a really big newsagent or whatever, where they had a huge selection, and you'd pick up a couple of specialist magazines from an area about which you knew nothing—hiking, model railways, whatever it might be—and very, very quickly you would start to pick up the fact that there are dissidents and mainstreams, all of that. It gave you this extremely passionate window into the "now".

Tom: Today, of course, you go online, and you can see that the Wikipedia entries for something like Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes are higher quality, better-referenced, longer and better-researched than many entries about the Second World War. You have this strange inversion in collective belief and emphasis, which ends up generating a lot more material a lot more confidently around the small stuff than the big stuff.

China: This is one of the bad things about the geekocratic moment. Even speaking as someone who loves geek culture at its best, nevertheless I think the sense of priorities is often skewed to the point of being demented.

Tom: Passion is very distorting. If the only reference you have is the strength of your own feeling, and you don't temper it with something like a sense of social good or importance...

China: Yes, if you don't contextualize it, it becomes disaggregated from totality—and ultimately it's totality that one is interested in, social totality.

Tom: Do you worry about solipsism as a trap for the kind of writing you're doing, the kind of things you're interested in?

China: I certainly do. For myself, it's an ongoing struggle, in the sense that I'm very, very aware of it, and I have a constant anxiety about, you know, the fear that none of this really matters. I think that is a function for me of the fact that I have a political approach to the world, and although I love the stuff that I do and the stuff that I'm into, I also think it's small potatoes in terms of what really matters.

You can negotiate that, you can metabolize it. I do fear my own ability to negotiate my loves and drives on the one hand, and what I think is socially necessary and important on the other. But I don't have an anxiety about solipsism in terms of forgetting and contextualizing stuff, because I'm steeped in a particular kind of political tradition. Seeing the world politically, which is what I'm talking about here, is integral for me, and becomes part of the work.

It's not just geek culture that has this problem, of course. But I certainly think that we are particularly prone to it in the geek world. As manifested by, for example, the preposterously hyper-exaggerated flame wars that grow up over points of aesthetic interpretation or predilection for moments of geek culture or, as you say, the disproportionate effort put into parsing a passable piece of geek culture.

I would read a lot of this symptomatically. This stuff acts as a solace for a lot of people, and I feel that myself. Given my druthers, all I would want to do all day is read books about monsters and draw pictures of them and so on and so forth, that's my drive. The other stuff I do, I tend to do out of a sense of necessity and urgency, not out of a sense of desire.

Tom: I know that you've published your doctoral thesis and stood for election in Britain. Do you have any concrete sense of what you want to do in the future in the political domain?

China: I love writing non-fiction and I would love to do more of it: it feels urgent to me. I certainly don't want to give the impression that I'm saying, you know, my fiction is all just a frippery and I don't care—I really, really work at the fiction, and it matters to me. But there's no question that the relationship between the concreteness of the world and fiction feels to me more mediated than when it comes to non-fiction and description and analysis. So I would like to do a lot more of that, partly because I enjoy it, partly because I think it's urgent, and partly because I want to get better at it.

If you're a fiction writer, you tend to get paid for your fiction, and also I find non-fiction much harder to do. But I have a couple of book projects I am hoping to pursue that are non-fiction, and I would like to spend the rest of my life bouncing between fiction and non-fiction. Although I think fiction will always take the lion's share. It's my main love.

Tom: Do you have a favourite among your books?

China: It will sound like a hedge, because generally I think my answer oscillates between three—can you oscillate between three things?—anyway, it does that. As a quick and dirty answer, the book that I think is probably the most seamless, the one that I think works best in its own terms, is The City and the City. The one that I think is in some ways the most ambitious, and that I've worked at the hardest over the longest time, is probably Embassytown. But the one that feels most kind of like an unmediated expression of my core, and that means the most to me for all its flaws, is Iron Council.

Tom: So Iron Council is the favourite child: it may not be the highest achieving, but you look at it and it's dearest to you?

China: I'm massively, massively proud of Iron Council. I know it has flaws, but I think it does certain things really, really well, and I think it's very ambitious formally. I'm not saying it's necessarily an unqualified success. I'm always more interested in honourable failures than in dishonourable successes.

Sometimes when you hear athletes say something about their own performance, and they say things that sound egocentric, but they don't come across like that because they are just relating to themselves as a machine. And I notice that sometimes, very occasionally, if you write something and you look in on it, you say almost dispassionately with a sense of surprise, "that's it, that's it, that works." I feel like that more with Iron Council than with any of the others.

Tom: This may be the wrong way of putting it, but I read you as a writer who is prepared to be flawed, by which I mean you are prepared to put something out that hasn't quite been pared down to perfect smoothness—because you'd rather be just that bit more ambitious, and keep pushing at boundaries. And I wonder if that's related to your willingness to put things into your books which are literally impossible, or which are deliberately not fully explained and tied up with a bow for readers...

China: For me those are two distinct questions. There's the question of putting things out which are flawed. On that I would say, basically, that I desperately want the books to be as good as possible. But what is true is that—partly as a function of the fact that I'm ongoingly conscious of my own inadequacies as a writer—there is this sense that everything you do is failing. And so the question, in an obvious Beckettian way, is: how well can you fail?

The bet, the wager, is that it is a lesser sin to have failures in the pursuit of an aspiration than to downgrade the aspiration and have fewer failures. I'm not cavalier about putting things out that are flawed; I think I'm more melancholically certain that I'm putting out things that are flawed, and I would rather really, really try at something, even at the risk of more flaws, if the trying matters.

Then there's the question of impossibility, which to me feels like a different thing: essentially the question of rigorous plausibility/possibility in a constructed universe. And I'm for the most part tremendously relaxed about all of that.

Now it is obviously true that there are certain moments for some reader where suspension of disbelief fails, and you get pulled out of the story—you know, YMMV, your mileage may vary—but for myself, I'm really quite forgiving, for two reasons.

One, because when it comes to nuts and bolts, physical stuff, I don't really care about hand-wavium. This is something we deal with a lot in the fantastic. I don't really care that HG Wells gets his sphere to the moon with gravity-repellent paint, I don't give a shit. Some readers really do give a shit—like Jules Vernes did—and it spoils it for them. To me it just doesn't. I don't care: I'm much more likely to be infuriated by psychological implausibility.

Then there is a second thing, which is for me one of the baleful aspects of a particular kind of geek mentality: this desperate desire to dot all i's and cross all t's. In the case of The City and The City, for example, one of the criticisms that some people levelled at it was, how could these two cities possibly have been like this, what was the history? If that pushes you out of the book as a reader, fair enough. When I am reading books that have things I don't understand in them, though, sometimes that mystery is completely part of the point. It's the desideratum, you know. And that disinclination to explain can, if done well, be part of what makes a book feel fucking great for me.

Tom: I glad you mentioned The City and The City again, because for me it feels like the decision not to explain the story behind its setup—you have these two cities that overlap physically, and living in one means being compelled to "unsee" everything in the other city—is an example of a dreamlike or paranoid logic that's important in your work. With the Eastern European setting, it makes me feel that what you're doing is aligned with writing like Kafka's—where what's important is not how things came to be this way, but rather what it feels like to try to live coherently within utterly bizarre conditions.

China: I like that description, and I think this notion of paranoia is a good one. It implies that this is not a totally new invented logic: it's simply an everyday logic that has been exaggerated, which is what paranoia does. It is essentially like cancerously rational behaviour. You extrapolate a general social or aesthetic logic to a point at which it becomes pathological.

Also, I'm very interested in radical aesthetics in general, and one of my loving complaints about the field of fantastic fiction is that there is often an excessive lack of interest in technique. We have had our great innovators—Samuel Delany; Michael Cisco more recently—but for the mainstream of the field, there is at best a lack of interest and at worst a genuine suspicion of experimentalism at the level of prose and form.

You see this very much in science fiction art. It's not to say that you want a book that is like Finnegan's Wake in space. But I think it would be a good thing for the field if there was more of an engagement with the potentiality of experimental and formal avant-garde approaches.

If the reader is having to work a bit, so is the writer. All books are a collaboration between reader and writer—and, as a reader, I don't mind having to work if I feel it's worth it. It's exciting.

Tom Chatfield is a British writer and commentator. His most recent book, "How to Thrive in the Digital Age" (Pan Macmillan), is out now. He blogs at tomchatfield.net and tweets at @TomChatfield

Ending an endless game: an interview with Julian Gough, author of Minecraft's epic finale

Tom Chatfield — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 16:54:07 +0000

Born in 1966, raised in Galway on the west coast of Ireland, and now resident in Berlin, Julian Gough has been many things: lyricist and singer for cult Irish rock band Toasted Heretic; author of the novels Juno & Juliet, Jude: Level 1 and most recently Jude in London; poet, playwright and polemicist. Julian and I met around five years ago, when I was an editor at Prospect magazine and he had just won the 2007 National Short Story Award. We’re now both full-time writers and have stayed in touch ever since, sharing a love of genre fiction and video games, fascination in the future possibilities of narrative, and sporadic despair at the state of contemporary literature.

This conversation took place in December 2011, prompted by one of the most unusual commissions of Julian’s writing life: his invitation to write a story to end the indie gaming masterpiece Minecraft in time for its official launch at Las Vegas in November 2011.

Tom Chatfield: So, how did you come to be writing the ending for Minecraft?

Julian Gough: A series of coincidences, like a lot of things in life. I live in Berlin now, and a couple of years ago a friend of mine called Robert Zetzsche organized something called BIG: The Berlin Indie Game Jam. Some people came over for it, and I said there was a nice cafe round the corner from me, so they organized it in the upstairs there: it was a small thing, really.

I met some nice people and saw some games. As it turned out later, and I didn’t realize this then, one of the people I had met was Markus Persson – aka Notch. At the time, he was just a guy in a hat working on a new game. Then in 2011 the completed version of the game was about to be launched in Las Vegas and they still didn’t have an ending, so Markus tweeted a request saying: does anyone know any talented writers, famous would be a bonus.

A couple of people who must have known us both from BIG recommended me, because they had read my fiction. So I got an email which I was not expecting, saying: would you like to write a high quality piece of narrative for the end of this game, Minecraft? Basically you can do whatever you like: surprise me. Which was an amazing, open brief.   It was only much later that I realized that this was the guy in the hat I had met two years earlier. I don’t know if he remembered me. He just tweeted.  

TC: Was there any kind of audition process or dialogue?  

JG: No, he just tweeted, some people recommended me, then he sent me an email.  

TC: You didn’t even need to reply to the tweet personally?  

JG: No, I didn’t even know he’d tweeted! I just got this email and I was like, what the fuck, what is that about? Why is he asking me? And then of course I Googled away like crazy and realized how big Minecraft was.  

TC: You hadn’t really heard of it?  

JG: This is the weird thing: I’d played it briefly in alpha in Berlin along with a bunch of other things – and Minecraft hadn’t even stood out at the time, because I was mostly just looking over people’s shoulders.   

TC: So you looked it up, saw what it was...  

JG: ...and realized how big it had become, which was a bit scary. Then I downloaded it, started playing and asking friends about it, thinking oh my god I’ve got to do a crash course in this. I immersed myself in it completely for a while to get it into my system.

TC: And you were given total freedom in what you wrote?  

JG: I gave Markus an idea of what I was going for, once I knew myself, and he said great, that sounds good. And when I finally delivered it he said that it tied in with some of his feelings about the universe. That was nice, that we were philosophically on the same page. He didn’t cut a word.  

TC: That’s the complete opposite of most experience of writing for video games, when your words are usually part of a very, very complex mechanism, and have to be precisely tailored to match the rest of it.  

JG: Yeah, this was the opposite of the usual game writing experience, and that I think was what Markus wanted. I didn’t have to explain where the dragons came from. He just wanted me to do something interesting and original, because it’s a very interesting and original game, and he wanted something that people weren’t expecting at the end. Like an ending, in fact. I mean, a lot of people didn’t want the game to have an ending at all, and I totally understand that.  

TC: How much Minecraft would you say you’ve played yourself?  

JG: Oh, embarrassingly little compared to the people who are really into it. In a way, I felt that Minecraft is what it is, and I didn’t want to explain it all away. I didn’t want to get inside the game and feel I had to explain everything that happened in it at the end, because people had had their own stories in their own minds. I wanted to do an ending that was outside of the game.  

TC: That’s interesting to me, because there is this huge contrast between the ending you wrote – which is essentially a fairly cryptic short story 1,500 words long – and Minecraft itself, a sandbox game that’s famous for its openness. I think people have given your story the title “wake up”, because that line comes at the end, and it feels like it’s about different layers of dreams, or realities...  

JG: The word “dream” gets used, but it’s really a story about the dream of a game, and the dream of life. It’s dream as metaphor. I love the strangeness that comes when people get so lost in a game that the game becomes the world. Because you do get lost like that. Especially in something like Minecraft, that’s so endless. You’re actually startled to come back into your life at the end of it. So I wanted to play with that moment, where you’re between two worlds, and for a short little period you’re not sure which one is more real.  

TC: Yes – and, as your story seems to suggest, the way in which we get lost in playing games is very much like the way we can get lost in the stories we tell about our own lives. I’m fascinated by this relationship between games and stories, because it always seems to come back to the tension between a pre-written story you’re being told, and the story you’re making up yourself in real time as you play a game.  

JG: The fact that we write the stories of our own lives is very interesting. We’re hardwired to be storytellers, and when we look back on our lives we build them into stories. And the more we find out about the nature of human consciousness, the clearer it is that we are making up stories after the facts a lot of the time, to make sense of decisions that we’ve made at a totally unconscious level: we have to make them into a story in order to navigate our own personal universe.  When someone goes into therapy, for example, you see how they can build two totally different stories about their life from exactly the same materials. When you’re playing a computer game, especially a very open one, you’re creating a self and an epic adventure that you’re the hero of. But you’re also doing that in real life when you’re walking down the street.  

TC: So the format you went for in the story was an overheard dialogue: the player is effectively listening in on two alien intelligences talking about them. Where did that come from?  

JG: I wanted a dreamy kind of feeling, like you’d broken through something. When you’re playing Minecraft in Survival mode, you’re performing a quest that is difficult and takes a long time. I felt that at the end of the quest there should be some moment of enlightenment, some ambiguous wisdom. That you should have something to bring back – and you should feel you’ve broken through into some other level. That is the feeling I wanted, and I liked the idea of an overheard dialogue to create it.  Now, here’s an odd thing. When writers look back over stories, they make up a story about the story and say, oh, I wanted to do this, I wanted to do that. But that’s not actually true to how it feels at the time. If I went back and told you what it was like writing it, it was quite odd, because I started trying to write my way into it and thinking, what do I want – but about half way through it, I had an odd feeling that doesn’t happen very often, where my hand started moving faster than my thoughts and I was just watching my hand. Probably for the last third of the piece, as it ended up, I didn’t really change it at all, because I found myself writing it in the first draft and almost floating back and looking at my hand moving, and being very pleased and surprised to see what came out next.  

TC: Thee story itself seems to encode that kind of automatic writing process: this idea that you’re taking dictation from the universe.  

JG: Yes, and by the end of it I actually felt like I was taking dictation from the universe. Now, I’m sure there are many ways of interpreting that experience that don’t require cosmic voices from unknown entities to be talking to each other, but it actually did feel like I was taking dictation. So perhaps it is real wisdom in the story, who knows?  

TC: It always seems to me there are two approaches to stories in games. The first is where the story is a linear thing, albeit with many branches, and you trot along making decisions and progressing through a plot that has been scripted in advance. And the second is what I call environmental story-telling: where everything is simply there to be discovered, and rather than a plot progressing as you take actions, the real narrative occurs as you piece together how the world you’re in came to be like this.

Most games have a mixture of these things. But I always worry that there is something fundamentally bogus about the first type of story-telling in a game, because it betrays the power of games as a medium: you’re squandering the chance to build a truly exciting, coherent other world based on allowing a player freedom of action.  

JG: Somebody else was saying this recently, a guy with a very Irish name. I read a couple of things by him – he was saying, and it’s a big influence on me at the moment, that linear storytelling is a bad use of what games can do. In games, we are creating worlds and environments, and the environment is the story, and it’s an infinite story: a hologram. Look at it from any angle, and it’s going to be different.  

TC: It may sound strange, but in some ways your ending to Minecraft reminded me of the film Inception. I thought Inception was crap in a lot of ways; but what I felt it captured very well was the experience of “coming up” after entering the other world of a game, in this image of someone falling in slow motion as music grows louder around them.

During the end of Minecraft, you’re forced to sit there for nine or ten minutes watching a very slowly scrolling screen full of text, and nothing else. It’s a bit like the slow-motion fall in Inception – or like a hypnotist counting gradually down from ten to one. I know it irritated and bemused many players, or they saw it as a joke....  

JG: Yeah, some of them really didn’t like it.  

TC: But more interestingly than that dislike, for me, was the fact that this ending really got to some people emotionally. It’s remarkable and strange – but entirely of a piece with reactions I’ve seen to other games – that some people seem to have gone away and thought about it loads. Those ten minutes have been a kind of miniature spiritual experience for them.  

JG: Brilliant! Because that’s what I wanted to do. And I have been getting messages on Twitter from people for whom that’s what seems to have happened: they can’t stop thinking about it, or are thinking about it a week later. I’m not going to take all the credit for it, but it’s like I’ve triggered some kind of emotion that was in them already. I’ve had some extremely touching messages – it’s kind of embarrassing to talk about – from people saying “thank you”, and that it really made them think, or that it was beautiful.

Of course, a lot of that comes out of the fact that this story is at the end of Minecraft: it would be very different if they had read it cold. I dip into forums from time to time to see people arguing about it, and it’s had the whole range of big reactions, which I think is a good thing. I’m always interested in stuff people hate, almost as much as stuff they love.  

TC: I was the lead writer for a game called The End in 2011 – a free-to-play Flash game for Channel 4 Education, for which I designed what you might call a philosophy mechanic, where people answered philosophical questions and it suggested ideas about their personality and beliefs. And one really interesting thing for me was just how receptive people were to quite big ideas through the context of a game, and how this gaming context also seemed to bring some big emotional reactions with it.

Some people got angry and were saying the writing was crappy, high school stuff – and some people were saying they had spent half an hour thinking about one question. But it was the emotional intensity and depth of engagement that got me, compared to what usually happens when I write for a newspaper or something...  

JG: Yes, it’s much more engaging in a game: you get right under people’s skin.  

TC: I think this is another reason why I’m so interested in the film Inception, to go back to that, because part of its message is that if you go deep enough into the dream – or into a game – you can seed an idea in someone, and it will get to them in that paranoid, strange little place where myths are born or perpetuated.  

JG: That’s certainly what I wanted to do. And I was greatly relieved when it turned out that it was working for some people. In fact, I would say that there are mental states accessible through computer games that similar to those accessible through drugs or meditation or religious experiences. You can break the shell of your mind, and find that your mind is bigger than you thought it was: there are frames beyond frames.  This probably sounds terribly pretentious, but fuck it. I’m fascinated by computer games. They are capable, I think, of helping us achieve any of the mental states that we are capable of achieving. They are not a genre, not a toy; they are infinite, and we haven’t begun to explore what they can do.  

TC: The gaming pioneer Richard Bartle talks about games in mythic terms: how your personal encounter with a game space maps quite closely to the mythical idea of “the hero’s journey.” You go in as this novice, this noob, make your way through perils and challenges, become heroic and powerful, and triumph over adversity.

This surely describes our experience of so many game-worlds. At the very end of Minecraft, you slay a dragon, for goodness sake! Markus has gone for the mythic bullseye.  

JG: Yeah. I’m a huge fan of the original book about the hero’s Journey, by Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces. I’ve read it quite a few times, and love his idea that there is one mythic story through all cultures – the monomyth – and that if you tease out the elements of any myths in any part of the world, they are the same story.

The next step, which is the one that interests me, is that this monomyth is essentially a metaphor for the individual journey that we all have to go in our lives. Whether we leave the house or not, whether we pick up a sword or not, we are going to have to go on a journey, encounter the universe, and try not to be destroyed by it – try to grow, and to come out of it with knowledge.  The trouble is that we start to believe that a myth is actually a set of facts, and that destroys it. If we think it’s actually a story about a guy who got nailed to a tree, or who went up to heaven off the top of a building – if we think these things actually happened, it kills it for us, because these are stories that are trying to go beyond language and words, beyond what we can say, to the unsayable truth.  Campbell’s argument – he wrote The Hero with a Thousand Faces just after World War Two – was that we live in a time when all the myths are dead, and this means that we’re in trouble, because it means that we don’t actually know how to achieve wisdom. We don’t have a stable myth that works, and so it is the job of the artist to try and make myths that are alive again. Campbell was really excited when Star Wars came out, because George Lucas had famously based Star Wars on The Hero with a Thousand Faces. And by god it worked – in every single culture around the world!  I think computer games can serve the function of religion. They can do the good bits that religion used to do, and hopefully not do the bad bits...  

TC: This has an interesting connection to that word “game”, which is inadequate in many ways, but has the great advantage that it insists on not being taken literally or seriously.   

JG: Yes, the playfulness of the myths is very important, and it’s when they lose their playfulness they die.  

TC: Yet one of the counterpoints to the idea of games expanding our consciousness is what’s sometimes called the solipsistic argument – it’s explored in science fiction by authors like Greg Egan. Essentially, it argues that we’re beginning to create simulations that are tailor-made to tick our evolutionary boxes, that are fun and rewarding – and this is dangerously seductive and easeful. So the future of humanity may be one in which we are addicted to toys, rather than seeing a great expansion of consciousness.  

JG: The trouble with working in an advertising-funded capitalist-structured world is that everything does tend to start speaking that language, including games. But what I think and hope we are going to have is the equivalent of the novel, where you have a mass-market product that most people consume, like they chew chewing gum or eat sweets – but you also get the Thomas Pynchons and Jane Austens and Shakespeares of the game world, who will do something meaningful.

It’s okay, I think, as long as only ninety or ninety-five percent of what’s out there is shit. I don’t think people can handle a relentless series of deeply meaningful encounters. I’m just about to start something on Twitter, in fact, from chatting to some friends of mine: the unfashionable book club. I think the first entry is going to be a Dick Francis racing thriller. Because some of the stuff that is absolutely genre, and making zero attempt to expand your consciousness, actually has tremendous power, and seems to me to be an important part of the culture that gets neglected by the elite. It’s a vital part of the cultural diet: and there’s a different between good crap and bad crap, it’s not all the same.  

TC: Yes. In games, too, I think there’s the risk of a dangerous kind of snobbery. When you look at massive social and casual games like Angry Birds and Farmville, a lot of marketing people rub their hands and look at the money, and a lot of high-minded gamers stick their noses in the air and talk about them as a kind of fodder for gaming plebs. But this means that interesting lessons aren’t being learned about why hundreds of millions of people are enjoying playing things like this.

Speaking of which – what kind of lessons and inspirations, if any, do you think we could be taking from Minecraft?  

JG: I’m still most inspired by its openness, and by what people do: the crazy Zeppelins, the Starship Enterprise. It’s infinite, and I love the way that it can be a completely different game for everybody. Your personality can come through.  I love seeing what people do: when they build a mile-high penis, even. It’s all good. In a way, it connects your conscious and your unconscious, which is always a good thing. We don’t get enough of it in our daily lives – and you can’t really do it in your office, just go and build a giant penis in the corner.  It’s not just mucking around, though. In an open game like Minecraft, you sometimes find out about yourself in a way that is interesting. Do you want to dig down and hide; do you want to build up a fortress?  

TC: When I play in Survival mode, I always like to build a tower first, square and straight, with torches on the walls all the way up to drive off baddies. Then I can stand safely on the roof, above the clouds. And then, only then, do I dig down, with doors to seal me off from the dark, after the beacon is in place.  Which probably says a lot about me as a person. It could almost be a tool for psychoanalysis. You watch someone play and see whether they build up, dig down, hide, go out killing, explore, create...  

JG: I’m not much of a one for killing. I’d rather build up bigger, madder things. But I think I’m a bit blocked and calcified. I need to go nuts in Minecraft for a bit, and find out who I am.

Tom Chatfield is the author of three books on digital culture, including Fun Inc., which explores the culture of video games. His next book, How to Thrive in a Digital Age, is forthcoming worldwide from Macmillan in May 2012. He tweets at @TomChatfield and blogs at http://tomchatfield.net

Cataclysm Coming: how the WoW expansion will change MMO gaming

Tom Chatfield — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 02:32:39 +0000

Images: (Thumbnail) Blizzard_Entertainment • (Top) Installation 00

Cataclysm coming...

By Tom Chatfield

A wave hundreds of feet high is breaking, poised to sweep away the statue whose open arms greet visiting ships. "Booty Bay is going down," I whisper to my wife. "I'm not sure I'm going to like this," she replies.

They're not calling the forthcoming World of Warcraft expansion "Cataclysm" for nothing. My wife and I have been playing the game ever since beta: that is, for over six years. This October, Cataclysm's full cinematic intro finally went up online ahead of its launch on 7th December, and we sat together in my study watching it. To a booming orchestral score, the earth opened, and a beast not seen since 1995's Warcraft II crawled out to rain down apocalypse.

The two of us are long-term but fairly casual World of Warcraft players. We raid occasionally. We don't tend to get sucked into the story, or spend much time reading lore. Still, watching an enraged dragon--Deathwing the Destroyer; Neltharion to his friends--levelling swathes of this virtual world in a frenzy of fire was a surprisingly emotive experience. It also helped confirm at least two expansion purchases plus continued subscriptions, bolstering the more than one billion dollars the game's parent company Blizzard Activision receives in income each year from over twelve million subscribers. Why do we care so much? And what does it mean that we do?

The significance of Warcraft has little to do with the traditional reasons that make a fictional narrative, characters or place involving. We care because Warcraft's world--the land of Azeroth--is a place we have spent a serious amount of time visiting and experiencing, via a lovingly-crafted handful of avatars. We have met people there, built friendships, had a lot of fun, worked hard and explored. We've gone away and come back countless times. On our main characters alone, we've spent almost four months of real time there. This is a geography we know more intimately than almost any part of the real world outside of greater London. We don't have kids yet, but when we do, we may well end up playing this game with them.

Image: GT's screenshots & wallpapers

I've just turned thirty. I was ten years old when the very first website was created, by one Tim Berners-Lee on a system he'd recently devised called the "world wide web." I've got used to the fact that there's no such thing as a website older than me. Now, though, I'm contemplating the fact that I own, or at least hire, virtual beings that may themselves be ten years old by the time I get around to creating any real progeny. And this increasingly strikes me as strange; or, at least, as something new.

Persistent virtual worlds have been with us for a long time, in digital terms. The first shared graphical worlds date back to the 1980s. Ultima Online, the first true Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game, launched in 1997 and is still being played today, with spruced-up graphics and some hefty nostalgia appeal on its side. What's got Warcraft where it is, though--controlling almost two-thirds of the paid-subscriptions MMO market--is a combination of skill and luck that has effectively reformulated on the fly a host of conventions about what such game-worlds can and should be for.

This struck me with particular force when I downloaded and began playing the game's major pre-Cataclysm update, Patch 4.0.1. Even players who don't shell out for the new Cataclysm content get what's in this: major revisions to the way the game's mechanics work, and to your characters' abilities. The patch impressed and excited me in a way I hadn't felt for a long time in Warcraft. For it seemed to mark the culmination of a sometimes hesitant process of refinement which--via 21 major patches, to date--has since the game launched seen it gradually homing in on a particularly potent notion of fun and player involvement.

This shift has meant a move away from wasteful complexity, and towards creating as many decisions as possible that players find meaningful. In blunter terms, it's about pulling psychological levers more effectively--and pulling these for more different types of people. To take a simple example of the latest developments, in one stroke patch 4 has eliminated a whole region of incidental "grinding," by removing the notion that characters need gradually to build up their skill with every different class of weapon. In the old days, every time your character went up a level a certain amount of time had to be poured into raising your skill with everything from daggers to staves to swords. It was a time sink, typical of the RPG genre. Blizzard's decision to dispense with it is just part of a continuing re-weighting of the game towards action and exploration, and away from time poured into bringing a character's stats up to scratch. They also, finally, got rid of ammunition for projectile weapons: an intense relief after six long years of running out of things to shoot at invariably inconvenient moments.

These relatively minor shifts have been combined in patch 4 with a major reduction in the amount players are required to do to keep their characters' abilities up-to-date. Rather than training an improved version of each spell or attack every few levels, things are now learned just once, then scale up automatically. There are fewer choices, too, when it comes to spending "talent points" on special abilities; while the choices here are more meaningfully differentiated. Rather than spending a total of 71 points on a mix of different abilities during the course of the game, you now have just 41--and can pick only one out of three specialised talent trees in which to invest all but 10 of these. Throughout the game, more is explained, and more is automated: the designers' own thinking is more clearly visible. A virtual world that six years ago felt esoteric, obtuse or just bloody-minded in places (running ten minutes in the form of a ghost in order to locate your corpse comes to mind) has become almost cosy. It no longer wants you walking for miles to locate a tiny object that can't be seen on a map, or slaying a hundred spiders to get one drop of poison. It wants you progressing, interacting, questing: knowing where the next objectives lie, and the ones after that.

Image: Installation 00

What all this marks is an evolution towards something designed for painless replay, exploration and social interaction, rather than something throwing time-sucking obstacles in the way of players griding their way towards the top. It's a profound shift for Massively Multiplayer Online games, psychologically as much as anything else. And one sign that Blizzard have got it right is the whining of old-school hardcore players. Through most of their history, MMOs remained very much in touch with their role-playing roots: games whose fundamental purpose was to offer tens or even hundreds of hours of progression for a character, allowing gamers of a certain mentality to grind their increasingly masochistic way towards a final state of game-beating power. If they were true masochists, they'd do it all over again; but the style was aimed firmly at a certain kind of geek for whom few things were more fun than near-endless skill-learning, re-learning, statistical analysis and stat re-balancing.

Paring away this process has been a long journey, and it's gone hand-in-hand with the realisation that having a permanent player community of over ten million players simply cannot revolve around eternal linear progressions. It has to mean doing interesting, sociable, varied things with a spectrum of characters. Above all, this means making somewhere that's fun simply to be, and that increasingly thinks of itself as an online destination as much as a game, complete with its own social structures, calendar of seasonal events, delightful incidentals and inexhaustible stock of repeatable daily tasks. What people themselves can do, should they wish, is extremely complex. But the tools at their disposal for doing things with: they keep on getting simpler.

All successful MMOS--from Ultima to EVE via Everquest--have achieved something of this, of course. But World of Warcraft is, today, looking at once more accessible and more radically willing to keep remaking itself than any other game out there. In deciding not to generate another brand new piece of land for the Cataclysm expansion, moreover, but instead to integrate its changes into a landscape with which most players have a long emotional relationship, the game's creators have cannily embraced the fact that the game's environment itself--and what it means to people--is perhaps their greatest asset (just as, I'd argue, their decision to set previous expansions within new continents sealed off from the old world was both disappointing and damaging to the experience of playing the game).

Cataclysm also makes me think that pretty much everyone else creating similar games to World of Warcraft ought to be terrified. Because if it's possible to keep on reinventing a game this well, how can anybody else hope to tempt you away from a place so layered with experiences and memories, and so relentless in re-calibrating itself on the basis of its users' behaviour?

Image: rowanf

There's a larger lesson here about what the increasing maturity of digital culture itself signifies. For the idea that everything inexorably gets outdated within a few years--a given of not only the video games industry throughout more-or-less its entire existence, but many major online players too--no longer holds. Increasingly, the future is being shaped by existing products, not new ones: by hugely successful franchises--but also by companies who, having won vast communities of users, are devoting their increasingly expert energies to holding on to them.

Take the announcement two years ago that PopCap's hit casual game Bejewelled would be made available to World of Warcraft players via a downloadable add-on, allowing them to use the game within Warcraft itself rather than switching between two windows. Why compete with other kinds of game for attention, or attempt to out-design them, when you can simply collaborate? This ability to change, learn and absorb is characteristic of many of the most dominant digital companies of the moment, and it marks a determination to be superseded not from outside, but only by newer versions of themselves. Among other things, Cataclysm will boast a homage to PopCap's most famous recent hit, Plants vs. Zombies. World of Warcraft doesn't want you never to play anything else. It just wants you to know that, whatever you like and whatever you are like, there'll always be something in it for you.

This is what you can do with a persistent world, if you put your mind to it. For "persistent" really does mean what it says. You never really stop playing--just as you never really own the game or even your own characters in the first place. Stop your payments and your subscription will lapse. But your avatars will remain, neither aging nor decaying, waiting for you to reactivate them whenever you decide you're ready. As, no doubt, many thousands of people will be deciding to do at this very moment, as the urge to revisit a transformed version of the place they spent so many hours exploring all those years ago kicks in.

Nostalgia and novelty have long been the two most significant forces driving interactive entertainment--and they have always tended to pull us in two different directions. Today, though, within places like World of Warcraft, they are increasingly powerfully aligned. And this inherently conservative force is already having major consequences for just for the games industry, but for digital culture at large. We play games because their miniature worlds are places where everything makes sense: where effort brings rewards, where neither we nor the place ever grows old. The little Eden of Azeroth may be about to be transformed, but in an important sense it will always also remain the same. We should be both grateful for this, and--if we believe that change and innovation are the lifeblood of the web--a little afraid as well.

Tom Chatfield is an author, essayist, and arts and books editor at Prospect magazine. His book about the culture of video games, "Fun Inc.," is out now in the UK (Virgin), and is published in America on 15th November by Pegasus Books. Follow him on Twitter at @TomChatfield

Image: GT's screenshots & wallpapers