Week 4, ladder of abstraction

This is an edi­tion of Robin Sloan’s video game devel­op­ment diary.

Welcome: to returning readers as well as everyone newly subscribed. If you missed it, week 1 sets up the moti­va­tion behind this project. All the pre­vious edi­tions are avail­able over on my blog.

The k in the hea­dine at the top of the page doesn’t even look wonky anymore. It’s all the other let­ters that are wonky.

White Mice Playing, Kubo Shunman, ca. 1816

No fun 3D ani­ma­tions in this edi­tion; no maps, no pixels. This week, it’s all about words.

This edi­tion will be looser than usual — therefore: quite loose indeed — because I’m going to work through some ideas as I write it. In the first edi­tion, I told you

the sen­si­bility here is defin­i­tively “you are working in the studio with me”

and this week you will learn that the sen­si­bility might some­times even be “you are in my brain with me.” Currently, my brain sounds like this:

That is the second and most cur­rent ver­sion of Jesse Solomon Clark’s “Green Goat home­coming theme,” the meaning of which you’ll under­stand by the time you get to the end of this edi­tion.

Here we go!

Wot I got

An impor­tant mile­stone draft, which, at the end of this newsletter, you will have the oppor­tu­nity to read, if you wish.

The Devil’s party

Just to quickly re-orient:

Perils of the Over­world aims to be an adven­ture game in which you set out on a grand, dan­gerous quest but then, as you aid others and are aided in return, find your­self enmeshed with them: and so, your quest ends not in the jaws of a dragon but in the grip of a community. In the vise of actu­ally caring! Which is, of course, wonderful, and which sets up a tension, I hope, between “winning” the game and “losing” the game. Losing will be pleasant and interesting. You’ll do it over and over.

The questing and caring play out in a medium-to-high fan­tasy universe, brazenly pastiche, homage to the books of my youth as well as the cozy, mashed-up set­tings of Japanese video game RPGs.

That is, however, still a very broad scope! What IS this world, exactly, and what kind of voice describes it?

First, where world­building is concerned, I am of the Devil’s party, which is to say, M. John Harrison’s. More than a decade ago, he wrote:

Every moment of a sci­ence fic­tion story must rep­re­sent the tri­umph of writing over world­building.

World­building is dull. World­building lit­er­alises the urge to invent. World­building gives an unnec­ces­sary per­mis­sion for acts of writing (indeed, for acts of reading). World­building numbs the reader’s ability to fulfil their part of the bargain, because it believes that it has to do every­thing around here if any­thing is going to get done.

Above all, world­building is not tech­ni­cally neccessary. It is the great clomping foot of nerdism. It is the attempt to exhaus­tively survey a place that isn’t there. A good writer would never try to do that, even with a place that is there. It isn’t possible, & if it was the results wouldn’t be readable: they would con­sti­tute not a book but the biggest library ever built, a hal­lowed place of ded­i­ca­tion & life­long study. This gives us a clue to the psy­cho­log­ical type of the world­builder & the world­builder’s victim, & makes us very afraid.

I find this for­mu­la­tion both cau­tionary and invig­o­rating. The message, as I receive it, is that the words are all there is. You cannot sub­sti­tute exhaus­tive back­story for lan­guage that crackles and con­jures. That’s the cau­tionary part: don’t try to com­pen­sate for your cruddy sen­tences with an intri­cate magic system.

The invig­o­rating part is: the words are all there is! And if that’s true, then words are all you need, and, my gosh, what LEVERAGE.

I will once again invoke the great one, Ursula K. Le Guin, who, near the end of A Wizard of Earthsea, wrote:

But … nothing is told of that voyage, nor of Ged’s meeting with the shadow, before ever he sailed the Dragons’ Run unscathed, or brought back the Ring of Erreth-Akbe from the Tombs of Atuan to Havnor, or came at last to Roke once more, as Arch­mage of all the islands of the world.

This is a per­fectly seduc­tive sen­tence; it is exactly what you want to read in a book about wiz­ards and sailboats. And: at the time she wrote it: Le Guin had no idea why a person would sail the Dragons’ Run, or what the nature of the Ring of Erreth-Akbe might be. That doesn’t mean it was a random lin­guistic spasm; Ursula K. Le Guin knew how to write a great line, obviously, and WHEW could she name a charis­matic entity. I mean, “The Tombs of Atuan” is so good it became the title of the next book in the series.

But the point is, there was no hulking source­book lurking behind that sen­tence. There was just: the sen­tence. One moment there was nothing, and the next there was:

or brought back the Ring of Erreth-Akbe from the Tombs of Atuan to Havnor

Less than twenty words; there’s your source­book right there.

So, that is all to say, POTO’s world will be built a sen­tence at a time. In the draft that I will share with you at the end of this edi­tion, you’ll find this line:

a hun­dred bar­rels of cider bound for the fifth divi­sion of the second army of the Gre­gar­ious Empire

and, while I had no idea what the Gre­gar­ious Empire was when I wrote it, it will not sur­prise you to learn: now I want to find out.

For me, this is very nearly the entire appeal of writing. Other people are drawn to fic­tion — reading it, writing it — for dif­ferent reasons, and that’s fine. Me, I live for the leverage. Somehow, a few curling sym­bols on a page or a screen can con­jure a sweeping impe­rial history. They don’t do it alone; they draw on the deep well of every­thing else you’ve ever read and heard. Even so: what a magic trick. I love it. I am com­mitted to it.

So: world­building, sorted.

The more vexing chal­lenge has been the game’s voice.

Outfit for Travel, Kubo Shunman, ca. 19th century

There was, and there was not

I’ve always thought of a piece of fic­tion’s voice as its overall “stance towards the world.” My novel Sourdough has a voice that is zoomed-in, personal, wry, up-to-the-minute contemporary. My story The Writer & the Witch has a voice that is zoomed-out, all-knowing, timeless, a bit melancholy.

The voice I’m going for in POTO is some ver­sion of the latter: the voice that intones, “Once upon a time … ” and you believe it. (Or, to use another great stock opening line: “There was, and there was not.” I like that one even better.)

In the intro­duc­tion to his recent-ish trans­la­tion of Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm, Philip Pullman quotes the poet James Merrill:

I yearned for the kind of unsea­soned telling found
In legends, fairy tales, a tone licked clean
Over the cen­turies by mild old tongues,
Grandam to cub, serene, anonymous.

“Serene, anonymous.” That’s it exactly.

The thing is: I have been having a LOT of trouble with this voice, which calls for not only a cer­tain reg­ister but a loose­ness with time; it calls for sen­tences like

Ninety-nine years rushed under the short stone bridge, and the writer’s life and legend grew together.

You might recall that POTO relies on a pro­gram­ming lan­guage called Ink to con­trol the story’s flow. Many times this week, I squared up to wrestle with my Ink document, writing one module after another, just absolutely unsat­is­fied with how it all sounded, how it all felt.

I was bogged down in “this, then that.”

It is one of the com­monest traps for the fic­tion writer; I have fallen into it many times before. “This, then that” means the action pro­ceeds for­ward at a con­stant pace, locked into a single tem­poral resolution. I’ll write a dorky example:

I walked out­side. The streets were empty, except for a man in some kind of jump­suit, blue and green — maybe from the power company. He wore a mask, too, which reminded me to pull mine up over my ears. I felt stiff from lack of exercise. At the crosswalk, I waited for the light to change, won­dering why I bothered. Up the street, a siren wailed.

It’s not horrible, but it goes thud … thud … thud. This, then that. This, then that. The monotony only grows if you keep it up over para­graphs and pages.

There is none of the arcing elec­tricity that I find in my favorite fic­tion.

Here’s another ver­sion of the ~same scene:

A week in isolation. For most of it, I picked crumbs off my belly. Five sea­sons of Dragon Gear Saga Excelsior and I wasn’t even halfway done. When I ven­tured out­side at last, there was just one other pedestrian, wearing a blue and green jump­suit that made me think of Ylys the Wyrm-Knight. While I waited for the light to change — why? — I spelled it in my head. Y-L-Y-S. Y-L-Y-S. Thank good­ness for subtitles. Up the street, a siren wailed.

Neither of those pas­sages is high art, BUT, the thing to notice about the second ver­sion is the way its clock is more elastic and how that opens up oppor­tu­ni­ties to make little asso­cia­tive leaps across time, space, memory, culture — every­thing.

Years ago, I had a great writing teacher, Roy Peter Clark, who taught me about “the ladder of abstrac­tion.” In his book Writing Tools — which I have given as a gift more times than any other book in existence — Roy writes:

Good writers move up and down a ladder of lan­guage. At the bottom are bloody knives and rosary beads, wed­ding rings and base­ball cards. At the top are words that reach for a higher meaning, words like freedom and literacy. Beware of the middle, the rungs of the ladder where bureau­cracy and tech­noc­racy lurk. Halfway up, teachers are referred to as full-time equivalents and school lessons are called instructional units.

You can read Roy’s entire (short) chapter about the ladder of abstrac­tion at Google Books, and I rec­om­mend it. (I mean: if you’re inter­ested in the craft of writing, you really need to just get this book. One of the things that makes Writing Tools so con­vincing is that it is, itself, lit­er­ally per­fectly written.)

So, a sen­tence plucked from the top of the ladder of abstrac­tion might be

The Gre­gar­ious Empire was without rivals for a thou­sand years.

While a sen­tence grounded at the bottom might be

A toad croaked from its shelter in the hollow of a rusted helmet.

Both of those are great! A vast empire — cool! A lil toad — nice! As Roy tells us, there’s good stuff at both ends of the ladder. Even better, there’s a huge amount of energy in the tran­si­tion between them, as you zoom from his­tor­ical abstrac­tion to telling detail and back again.

In the ladder’s bland middle, things are nei­ther thrillingly broad nor crun­chily specific. And, unfortunately, the middle is where “this, then that” lingers.

I am making a video game, but/and it will suc­ceed or fail, as surely as a novel would, on the quality of its prose, and my Ink drafts were stuck there in the bland middle. The player walked into town; decided where to explore; searched for an inn; gath­ered information; decided where to explore after that … ugh. It was the turn-by-turn trudge of a mediocre Dun­geons and Dragons session.

To make mat­ters worse for myself, I had been reading Hero Leg­ends of the World, which I have shown you before — 

—and it was AWFUL, because it was wonderful. These stories, as retold by Hans Bau­mann and trans­lated into Eng­lish by Stella Humphries, are com­pletely gonzo and per­fectly concise. Their “world­building” is utterly telegraphic. Look at this opening paragraph; look how fast it moves, how instantly it con­jures itself:

So here I am, reading Hero Leg­ends, reading Pullman’s Grimm, rereading my own plod­ding Ink, trying again, pro­ducing nothing better, get­ting frustrated, and, honestly, despairing a bit, which is almost always a sign that you need to take a step back.

That’s what I did. I closed the Ink editor and, instead, just … Wrote Some­thing The Normal Way. And, almost immediately, it worked. The whole scene tum­bled out, in almost exactly the right voice, casu­ally informing the reader that a year had passed, and another, and another. It moved up and down the ladder of abstrac­tion. It became unstuck.

Here is the draft that I produced. I can’t say I really rec­om­mend reading it — I mean that sincerely — but it felt like a breakthrough, so, in the spirit of “working in public,” I thought it might be interesting, even useful, to share.

As soon as it emerged, I sent it to my col­lab­o­rator Jesse Solomon Clark, who replied, in classic Jesse fashion:

Just posted a tune in response to this draft. Sort of a Port Fabri tavern string band con­tent­ment theme.

So if you DO read this draft, you are oblig­ated to enjoy it along­side this week’s

Sound snack

which is the ini­tial ver­sion of Jesse’s tavern string band con­tent­ment theme :’)

(Now go back to the top of this newsletter and com­pare it to the second ver­sion, which he sent over Sat­urday night.)

The draft I’ve linked above truly is a DRAFT, unpol­ished and unfinished, wonky in all the ways, but the impor­tant thing is that it made me say, oh, there you are: the voice I’ve been looking for. Or, at the very least, a sign­post pointing the way toward that voice.

A block of prose Written The Normal Way isn’t a game; it’s hardly game-like at all. But it does rep­re­sent a sequence of events and a col­lec­tion of feel­ings that I want the reader-player to experience. So, the ques­tion becomes: can I now trans­form this Normal Prose into Ink: stepwise, branching, explorable? I believe the answer is yes, but/and

Wot I’ll do

this week is: find out.

From Oakland,

Robin

P.S. Did you want to see the rest of my mythopo­etic hoard? I THOUGHT YOU MIGHT

I don’t know how any­body writes without a Dic­tio­nary of Fairies close at hand … !

This has been an edi­tion of my video game devel­op­ment diary, sent by email every few weeks. You can subscribe: