New Writing...

Via Gamasutra, I published two new articles on game Development in the last 6 months...

Reality Bytes : Pondering The Limits Of Realism
A meditation on the pros and cons of video game realism in all its forms, and why games don't need to aspire in that direction to be engaging, emotional, and interesting.

Digital Future, Invisible Past : What Lives On When A Good Game Dies
An investigation into the ephemeral nature of video games as a medium, and a novel theory about what our true legacy will be.

Also, just finished writing a play. Still need a title for it; the old one was stale.

Baudelaire In Translation, Part I

Two poems by Charles Baudelaire, translated into free verse versions ... originals included below.

*

Music

So often music transports me like an ocean!
Towards my pale star,
Beneath a ceiling of mist or in a vast ether,
I take to the sea.

My bosom pushed forward and my lungs inflated
Like canvas sails.
I ride the backs of amassing waves
Hidden by the night.

I feel within me all the vibrating passions
Of a trembling vessel;
The merciful wind, the tempest and its throes

On this open abyss,
Cradle me. Otherwise, stillness—a vast mirror
Of my despair.

— Kloé Rahilly & Darby McDevitt

La Musique

La musique souvent me prend comme une mer!
Vers ma pâle étoile,
Sous un plafond de brume ou dans un vaste éther,
Je mets à la voile;

La poitrine en avant et les poumons gonflés
Comme de la toile
J'escalade le dos des flots amoncelés
Que la nuit me voile;

Je sens vibrer en moi toutes les passions
D'un vaisseau qui souffre;
Le bon vent, la tempête et ses convulsions

Sur l'immense gouffre
Me bercent. D'autres fois, calme plat, grand miroir
De mon désespoir!

— Charles Baudelaire

Short Fiction From Way Back

(Note: I wrote this piece over 10 years ago, possibly 15. I stumbled across it last night and it made me smile more than once, so I decided to publish it here and give it a final resting place. Minor amusement, nothing more. -DM)

The Critics are Talking About This Life's Monument

"As majestic and fragile as a hydrogen Zeppelin, this is one story I can guarantee will afflict that small part of your anatomy you call your 'sense of decency' with a ravaging apoplexy. Enter with care; exit enraptured."
     -Roddy Rakish, Author of The Chartruse

"A canny look at the building blocks of culture. No stone is left unturned, no brick unmortared, no cornerstone unchristened … no flagstaff unsundered, no window uncracked, no tapestry unhung … no billiard table unbroken, no gas lamp unsnuffed … no rampart unmanned, no head unshaven, no knee unbent … a true delight."
     -Garry 'Gristle' MacHugh, Conjuror Laureate

"Crushed, rebuilt, intensified, illuminated, rarefied - these are the founding artistic principles of This Life's Monument. Extemporaneous, Magical, Fraternal, Wet, Green, Loaded - these are the Adjectives that describe it best. Read it today - this is the injunction I pass on to you."
     -Kiki Rote, a New Woman since that day in Fresno

"Never before in the history of literature has an author conceived a character so vague and indistinct and yet so compelling as Kid Ubiquity; and never before has a protagonist roused such complex reactions and agonies. Kid Ubiquity and his colleagues at the International Tychist League are the secular trinity of decency, shame, and ambition rolled into a single bundle for our investigation."
     -Rev. Buck Young

"A Riot! A Tour De Force! I laughed my ass off and wiped my tears away … crystal tears of limpid bliss… A real treat!"
     -Not Her Real Name

"A … bizarre [story] … I … like[d] ... it."
     -Sven, Accounts Manager

Music Music Music

A small update to my album Technoir Classics '78 - '86.
The whole damn thing is available on Bandcamp:


Listen here. Or visit the page itself...

Love Love Love Thud of the Old Plunger

Heaviness of mind and heart pushing through these battering winter winds. Sometimes feeling thick and syrupy, like the solid swirls in a block of marble, cold and inert, only the illusion of forward movement. Yet still ... the sun is out!

Today I'm glad I remembered this old poem, tracked it down, and devoured it...

Cascando

By Samuel Beckett

1
why not merely the despaired of
occasion of
wordshed
is it not better abort than be barren
the hours after you are gone are so leaden
they will always start dragging too soon
the grapples clawing blindly the bed of want
bringing up the bones the old loves
sockets filled once with eyes like yours
all always is it better too soon than never
the black want splashing their faces
saying again nine days never floated the loved
nor nine months
nor nine lives

2
saying again
if you do not teach me I shall not learn
saying again there is a last
even of last times
last times of begging
last times of loving
of knowing not knowing pretending
a last even of last times of saying
if you do not love me I shall not be loved
if I do not love you I shall not love
the churn of stale words in the heart again
love love love thud of the old plunger
pestling the unalterable
whey of words
terrified again
of not loving
of loving and not you
of being loved and not by you
of knowing not knowing pretending
pretending
I and all the others that will love you
if they love you

3
unless they love you

*

Best known for his plays, then his novels, Beckett was also a life-long if infrequent scribbler of verse. His earliest poems were baroque pieces of jaunty wordplay and opaque symbolism, thinly veiled attempts to tear Joyce's crowd from his head. But he never quite managed this, being always too clever by half, and never empathetic.

But as Beckett aged, his poems grew as spare and trim as the rest of his writing. The above poem comes from a period just before his most fruitful. He is learning to dispense with extraneous details and useless allusions, and cut straight to the bleeding heart of the matter.

It's a great little piece of writing. The sound of an exhausted chest heaving, of a man tired of pretending his unrequited love isn't poisoning him, one breath at a time.

"The grapples clawing blindly the bed of want..."

"The churn of stale words in the heart again..."

"If you do not teach me I shall not learn..."

I like to think it was this poem that made things like Waiting for Godot, Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, Happy Days and Company possible. The shape of his sentiment is here, almost fully formed.

Game Theories: Epic Fails

I was having a late-night discussion with some designers at work about the nature of Succeeding and Failing in games. The question of the hour was this:

"In a narrative-driven or narrative-inflected game, what is a player's threshold for tolerating narrative failures with respect to gameplay."

To illustrate this, consider an exemplary assassination set-up in a typical Assassin's Creed game: You are given a target, and discover multiple approaches to reaching him. After choosing your path, you sneak up on the target and press the final "Attack" button. The assassination animation kicks in ... then cuts to one of the following cinematics:

1. You plunge your blade into the target's chest, killing him. [Success!]

2. You plunge your blade into the target's chest, but the target is wearing an iron vest a la the Man With No Name in "A Fistful of Dollars." Surprise! Your blade breaks. He has tricked you. After you wrestle, your target escapes. [Failure!]

3. You slam your fist down, but your target slips to one side at the last moment. The blade misses completely and slams into the ground. Your target rolls away and escapes. [Failure!]

Two of these scenarios end in narrative failure, one in success, and yet, in all three the gameplay loop is exactly the same -- the planning, approach, the execution of the attack. In all three cases, the player can be said to have "played the same game."

Technoir Classics '78 - '86

New Music for a New Year!

Download Autographic's "Technoir Classics" right here.

Some background: I started composing the beats for this album on an MPC-500 back in August of 2010. I was in the process of dismantling my life in Seattle, preparing for a move to New York. Most of the work was done late in the evening, sitting on a mattress on the hardwood floor of a naked room bathed in the light of "Logan's Run" and "Soylent Green" playing on my laptop.

Three weeks later I was in Spokane, staying with my parents for a few weeks before heading East. I set up a small studio in their basement and began recording most of the basic backing tracks. But this process only got me about halfway to the finish.

Then something unexpected happened: I stumbled into a job in Montreal, just 4 days into my drive to NYC. It's a long story, but it resulted in work on the album being suspended for quite some time. I didn't dive back into recording until after I had finished work on "Assassin's Creed: Revelations", a project that consumed my life for almost a year.

At last, by late 2011 I returned to the album, and over the course of 10 months, dedicated a few hours a week to finishing it.

So it's done. It's fun. It's lo-fi. And it's a messy tribute to a few of my favorite things: The early 80s hip-hop and Electro scene in NYC, and the Technoir films of the 70s and 80s.

Enjoy.

A Leonard Cohen Cover

Here's a cover of Leonard Cohen's fantastic song. I sing, play guitars, and devised some of the swirling atmospherics. Bryant Moore plays drums, bass, and horns. While recording I wanted to see if I could come up with an emotive harmony to accompany the already amazing melody, and I'm pretty happy with what I ended up with -- though I use it sparingly, only at the end of the second verse and chorus.

I should note here that I screw up the lyrics in one spot: in the second verse I sing "...you set yourself..." while the original lyric goes "...you fixed yourself..." It's impossible to say why I misremembered this line but the damage to the song is minimal, I think. My addition, while not better, is weirdly ambiguous.

Game Theories: The Whiteboards

Over a year ago I left a nice job at Griptonite Games near Seattle, Washington with a mind to seek my fortunes in the east. My plan was to move to New York City after taking two months off to finish a few lingering personal projects and begin a few more. That almost happened, until life intervened. But that's another story.

The day before leaving, I brought my camera into the office to execute pet project that had been simmering in my head for a long time. I wanted to take pictures of my colleagues' whiteboards. Over the course of my many years in the game industry, I had grown fond of the messes that accumulated on the small doodle stations adorning every cubicle in the building. And I mean, every cubicle. Griptonite was as generous with whiteboards as they were with staples. And thank heavens, too, because they always came in handy....

The fact that nearly everyone had access to a whiteboard is precisely the cause of what I love most about these pictures: the juxtaposed variety of evidence of every discipline in the studio -- programmers and artists, designers and producers -- haphazardly scribbling to make their ideas known, to solidify concepts, or just let off a little steam. The whiteboard empowered everyone.

It's too obvious to admire the remnants left behind by the clearly talented artists in these pictures, through fun all the same. But what I like best are the wrinkled diagrams and the hastily scratched notes. They are visible evidence of a halfway point in an otherwise inscrutable creative process; these are middles of so many unknowable ideas. Ideas that started in someone's head, leaked out on to a whiteboard in any one of five or six colors, and then perhaps, if it was lucky, eventually made its way into a game that you yourself may have played only last year. Just maybe.

Click on through to see more. And click on the photos themselves to blow 'em up bigger.

Random Thought

Internet forums are the future of literature.

Assassin's Creed Revelations: A Bibliography

If you happen to enjoy Assassin's Creed Revelations and would like to know more about the era, its people, and the city of Istanbul, these are a few of the books we used to bring our tale to life. Tread heavily, dear adventurer, for history is a muddy, murky place, and rewards only those with long and solid strides.

Osman's Dream: The History of the Ottoman Empire, by Caroline Finkel

The Ottoman Centuries, by Lord Kinross

Istanbul: The Imperial City, by John Freely

History of the Ottoman Empire and Turkey, Vol. 1, by Stanford J. Shaw

Mission to Constantinople, by Liutprand of Crimona

The Turkish Empire: The Sultans, the Territory, and the People, by Rev. T. Milner.

History of the Ottoman Empire, by Edward Upham

History of the Byzantine Empire, George Finlay

The Fourth Part of The World, by Toby Lester

DK Eywitness Travel Guide: Istanbul, by Rose Baring

Some books from Turkey with loads of pictures that Mustapha brought back from Istanbul

Google Images

Wikipedia

Rumors

A Call To ADVENTURE

This is a quick note to say that the book I have been working on for the past five years -- called Adventure -- is now FINISHED.

Buy it here.

What happens in Adventure?

A young boy, fed up with life under the constant scrutiny of his parents, sneaks from his bedroom into the wild and woolly world in search of a life of adventure and intrigue. Wayfaring far and wide, he makes his way to a town named Proscenium--a quiet, mid-sized metropolis build on a cliff at the edge of the known world. What lies beyond that hazy border is anybody's guess ... but our young boy is determined to discover it. A comic picaresque, served up in a surreal cloud of imagination and fading memory, Adventure is both a celebration and a parody of the well-worn coming-of-age novel.

Bonus Points: If you see any typos in the manuscript, do let me know. I'll hook you up with a free copy of the book if I manage to made a hardcover version.

Extra Bonus Points: If you are a visual artist, and happen to like the book, and would like to contribute visual media to accompany it, please contact me. Eventually I hope to publish Adventure with 20 to 30 illustrations, paintings, collages, etc. included with the text.

Triple Bonus - here is the opening paragraph:

"I was wide-awake when my adventure began, I hadn’t slept for days. Without saying goodbye, or goodnight, or feeling a twinge of remorse, I set out that first evening finally fearing nothing, emboldened by a hunger for newness. I was a boy still, more or less, and though there weren’t many good reasons to disobey my parents, I did it regardless. I steeled my will and disobeyed them casually, sneaking out into the world well past my bedtime. This wasn’t a rational decision—not in those days, when so much of my comfort was at stake—but it had to be made. Parents are in charge for too long before they give up, and I couldn’t wait the length of my youth for that miracle. It was midnight and my will was strong, and my opportunity ripe. It was time to begin the adventure."

Thank you for your kind attention. Enjoy.

Darby McDevitt

Random Quasi-Informed Thought

L.A. Noire seems to contain about as much "Noir" as Troll 2 contains trolls.

Additionally, among those who have reviewed the game -- positively and negatively -- I haven't found any great pieces written by fans whose familiarity with Film Noir extends past L.A. Confidential and Chinatown. Not that this is a terrible thing, but it does seem like a wasted opportunity to educate.

Folks, for starters:

Out of the Past
Kiss Me Deadly
Touch Of Evil
Criss Cross
In A Lonely Place
Night and the City
Double Indemnity
The Big Sleep
Murder, My Sweet
The Killers

Back to games, this article is great. Not simply as a review, but as a critical evaluation of the pitfalls and possibilities of storytelling through games.

New Everything

It's been a long time since I posted anything. Not for any good reason, but I have been busy indeed. Moved from Seattle via New York to Montreal to work at Ubisoft Montreal. I'm writing things for them. In due time I'll be able to say what exactly.

More later, maybe.

Game Theories: A Practical Guide To Game Writing

Gamasutra published another article of mine about a month back. In "A Practical Guide to Game Writing" I teach interested, dedicated game developers how to get the most out of their writers. Check it out.

Game Theories: The Deaths of Game Narrative

An article I wrote for Gamasutra is up. Called "The Deaths of Game Narrative", it's a whimsical look at death, design, and storytelling in the digital world. An excerpt:

It's been quite a year for epic, narrative-driven games -- titles vast in scope, grand in ambition, and gorgeous in execution -- and I have fought my way through a few of the best.

In recent months I have transformed into an exiled Florentine nobleman thirsty for vengeance in Renaissance Italy; I masqueraded as a continent-hopping, chiseled chunk of vainglorious derring-do in search of lost treasure; and I traveled the western wilds of the United States as a battle-scarred loner fighting to restore his dignity and return to his family.

To the ear of an outsider, this might sound like a pretty diverse scrapbook of experiences, and I'd say this was half right. But there's one element that draws all these titles together under a cozy umbrella. In each game, the protagonist -- my avatar -- is a mass murderer...

Mark Hollis, Come Back

Today, a friend reminded me to take my monthly Mark Hollis. I rarely forget, and fall ill when I do.

Andy Warhol

I first began to appreciate Andy Warhol the moment I lost interest in his artwork. The man Andy was the thing to watch. He was the worthwhile object of all inquiry. The milieu he created was his canvas and all the art objects he produced were mere souveniers of a specific node in spacetime. If you didn't buy the t-shirt while you were there, don't bother looking for one now. What else should we think about a man who called his workshop The Factory? Could he have stated his intentions with any more clarity?

Yes, Andy's single important contribution to the world was himself. He generated the aura that Walter Benjamin worried art had lost forever in the age of mechanical reproduction. Andy spun magic scenester ju-ju so hard that he fooled people into thinking art production was actually a glamorous endeavor. Imagine! Soon people wanted to try this art thing themselves, but not because they adored the process of making it. Only because they adored themselves, and Andy, and the way it felt to participate without having to labor.



It's tempting to watch this and see nothing but a flippant hipster (a flipster!) disavowing any responsibility to indulge in polite conversation with an obtuse press; tempting because it's true, obviously. But it's also safe to take Andy at his word. His methods were easier ... he says exactly same thing about film a few years later: Film cameras are great, he argues, Because you just turn them on and walk away. After a short while, you've got a movie.

So while Andy traipses around carving himself out of ethereal clay, the work he sells to keep him afloat us is not a final product in the old sense, nor is he selling the sluggish thrill of "the process" to his admirers. No, he has perfected the intoxicating thrill of the "Have Done". Everyone knows this feeling. Everyone yearns for it at some point. "All writers want to have written" goes the old saying, and Andy offered an analogous experience to all in his orbit: simply by being around him, they had done things. Everyone was a filmmaker, everyone was a painter, everyone was in a band; everyone was everything around Andy Warhol. If he had written a novel, I'm sure he would have charged people for the privilage of looking over his shoulder as he scribbled ... or over the shoulder of whomever was writing it for him. It might even have sounded something like this:

Game Theories: Object Innuendo

Here's a small recipe to spice up a dull party:

Rule:
Name three objects found in a grocery or drugstore which, when purchased together, give your cashier the impression that the strangest night of your life is about to commence.

Example:
A cucumber, a jar of patroleum jelly, a disposable camera.

I codified the rules for this one about 5 years ago and have played it numerous times since. Players typically dive right into the risqué stuff first, but after the first few rounds the combinations tend to get more subtle and strange. Some people even take the shocking step of avoiding sexual innuendo altogether. Weird, right? But it works.

A Film By Any Other Name...

Via Ta-Nehisi Coates, a shock-trailer for a film from the 60s titled "My Baby Is Black!"

Originally titled "Les Laches Vivent d'Espoir" (does this translate to "The Fearful Live In Hope"?), "My Baby..." was a French production with a bit more attempted integrity than the American rubric can possibly allow. Having never seen the film, I am unprepared to judge whether or not it has suffered unjustly from this swap, or if it is still a piece of garbage, but the original French title seems to imply some attempt at sensitivity.

This sort of targeted rebranding is still quite common, of course, and rarely capricious; there's always a profit motive to these alterations. Catherine Breillat's 2001 film "A Ma Soeur" -- literally "With My Sister" -- was renamed, for our amusment, "Fat Girl". This is a rather blunt take on a quietly disturbing film about the destructive tendancies of male sexual desire on maturing girls.

Whenever I hear of this kind of artistic gerrymandering, I can't help but wonder if the people responsible have done so on the basis of a lot of careful scheming or out of sheer fear. Is the potential audience for a film titled "Fat Girl" larger than the audience for "With My Sister"? Are they they completely different audiences, and if so, is one substantially larger than the other? Will the "Fat Girl" hopefuls leave the film disappointed after merely having seen "With My Sister"? Managing expectaions is the name of this ugly game, but perhaps it works to the artist's benefit more often than not.

A few nights ago I watched Leos Carax's 1986 film "Mauvais Sang" - "Bad Blood" - and was surprised to find under the film's title-card the subtitle "The Night Is Young". This title appeared nowhere on the DVD case or in any of the menus however - both advertised the original French. But again I was made to wonder, did "Bad Blood" first appear on these shores as "The Night Is Young"? This would be 1986, you see - the middle of the first decade the AIDS epidemic, which the film makes numerous allusions to. Was this the reason behind the change; the fear that the vague reference to "Bad Blood" might transmit the wrong impression. What sort of mind bubbles with this sort of skittishness, I wonder? And can you make a good living this way?