I wrote a post-mortem for my game in IF Comp 2023, which was fun to write and people enjoyed reading. I thought I might do it again for my 2025 entries. I’ve decided to separate my thoughts on Anne from those on Cart, but you can read Cart’s post-mortem as well.
Statistics
Development period: Late 2023 – IF Comp 2025
Programming languages: Twine (Sugarcube)
Testers: 5
IF Comp Reviews: 9
Passages: 154 (140 story passages)
Words: 44,123
Lines of code: 2,454 (1,454 Twine + 666 JavaScript + 334 CSS)
The above statistics are reported by tweego and a tweaked version of cloc.
Project origins
Every year, about the end of IF Comp — which is a coincidence really — granny holds an annual Book Day where the grand kids get a big box of hand-chosen books. These books often end up in the night-time book reading circulation. One of them was a heavily abridged illustrated version of Anne of Green Gables. One night when I asked my daughter (of IF Comp 2023 reviewing fame) what book she’d like, she said: “Anne of Green Cables”.
I thought the malapropism was funny, and mused on the mashup of pastoral Anne with cyberpunk. I mean, it couldn’t work. They were so far apart on every axis that it’d be too much of a stretch to actually write something like that. I was still intrigued by the idea, and surprised that my Internet searches suggested that no-one had done the idea before, and ordered a copy of Green Gables from Amazon.
I admittedly wasn’t familiar with Anne Shirley at all. My wife had watched “Anne with an E” on Netflix. I was aware of older movies or TV shows, but had never seen them. In fact, embarrassingly my brain had conflated Anne Shirley with Pippi Longstocking; you know, red-haired bold girl in content made for little girls. Before my copy had arrived, I noticed that our house was littered with copies of the unabridged Green Gables, and even a few copies of the later novels.
When I finally sat down to read Anne of Green Gables, I was blown away. L.M. Montgomery’s writing was so damned good: the subtle social commentary, the wry-but-kind jabs at each character, and the adoration of nature… Why the hell hadn’t I been introduced to Anne before?!
This still didn’t solve how I might write “Green Cables”, but a third idea came along that wrapped it up into a project I was interested in. I’ll talk about that idea later, but at least I had a general vector.
Adaptations
In preparing for this project, I read a lot of adaptations of Anne of Green Gables. There’s been a lot. I couldn’t find anything meaningfully cyberpunk, so I felt like I was in new territory.
Anne’s adventures are in a very peculiar position, legally. The original first novel came into the public domain in 1992. In fact, the copy I bought from Amazon was basically an adequately typeset version from Project Gutenberg with a nice cover and a very minimal “Were you paying attention?” quiz at the end. Now while the text of the original is in the public domain, authorities in the real Prince Edward Island have established an Anne of Green Gables Licensing Authority to protect the “marks” of Anne of Green Gables. There’s pride and tourism in not having Anne Shirley traded out to any old marketer, and I get that.
If I was to do this project, would I get the Mounties chasing me down? The answer: we’ll see! I did contact the Anne of Green Gables Licensing Authority on a few occasions to see what the deal was. They have a licensing application that costs $50 to submit, but is wholly predicated on big budget productions using Anne’s likeness for money. I’m thinking someone at Netflix filled that out for Anne with an E, but it did not seem appropriate for my fan fiction. They never got back to me, despite my best efforts.
I’ve bought and loaned a number of Anne of Green Gables adaptations, and none of them mentioned the licensing authority. I’m an Australian, so I feel like Prince Edward Island’s jurisdiction is limited here, and I did some research on the Australian laws on this sort of thing. It seemed like I was on okay grounds. My effort would be hopefully seen by dozens dozens! of people and earn no money. While I’m a bit flippant in this write-up, I did my best without going the route of spending a lot of money to get someone to shrug at me.
The question remained: what was Anne of Green Cables? What does a cyberpunk Green Gables look like? I mean you can wrap everyone in chrome, drop in a few “chooms” and call it a day, but I didn’t want to do that.
The licensing authority has the following three guidelines:
- They must be appropriate to the image of Anne.
- They must be of high quality.
- They must be appropriate to the use or purpose for which they were intended.
Taking these in reverse order I first needed to make the adaptation specific to interactive fiction. There needed to be a suitable amount of interactivity to it. The structure of the game, especially the mini-game at the end, was carefully chosen to reflect interactivity, rather than just a clickable version of the original. Next I needed to make something of high quality. Well, I tried my level best on the writing, graphic design and programming. Was it high quality? Some say yes, some say no. Lastly, appropriate to the image of Anne is quite the straightjacket if you take the cyberpunk cue very simply.
Actually Anne of Green Cables is solarpunk, hopepunk or some very particular punk, all options that approximately 0% of the world knows or cares about. These forms of cyberpunk focus on love of nature and a yearning to unite civilization with technology in a productive way, which is something we need nowadays but as a genre isn’t popular. Cyberpunk is slightly more recognizable as a genre, even though there is a lot less content than I had expected. Internet search is tainted with the incredible popularity of Cyberpunk 2077, the video-game RPG made after the tabletop RPG, which is a very particular form of cyberpunk. To remain appropriate to Anne, I jettisoned a vast number of things associated with cyberpunk that would be distasteful, mostly under the banners of drugs, sex and rock-and-roll.
Some people might consider it foolish to begin with a ridiculous project premise like “Anne of Green Gables plus cyberpunk” and strip out all the things they might associate with cyberpunk. This reminded me of that classic scene in Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation where movie Charlie Kaufman (Nicholas Cage) is taking a class by movie Robert McKee (Brian Cox).
I thought about this interplay of expectations, not least of which thinking of IF Comp and movie Robert McKee’s “And why the FUCK are you wasting my two precious hours with your [game]? I don’t have any use for it! I don’t have any bloody use for it!”
Anne Shirley, punk icon
My IF forum icon aside, I’m probably the least punk-looking person imaginable. But I really enjoy that elusive idea of the “punk aesthetic” which is often conflated with nihilism or anarchy, but is actually quite different. It’s hard to concisely capture it but some important points are anti-establishment views but framed within individual freedom, expressive aesthetics despite cultural norms, and a do-it-yourself focus. There are strong connections to feminism as well as satire.
Anne Shirley, once you get to know her, is very strongly in this subculture. She continually ignores authority, or only adopts it on her terms (much to Marilla or her teachers’ despair). She refuses to be bound by everyone else’s lack of imagination. Her inventiveness and resourcefulness comes up time and time again in the novel. She rails against gender norms as best she can for her age and position. Anne Shirley is punk as fuck.
This realisation made the transition to cyberpunk easier. I had to adapt a few points to make her fit a little better. I accentuated the DIY aesthetic whilst trying to weave it into her imaginative approach to the world. I framed her as a “maker” who intuitively understood technology and enjoyed it on the level of a friend. Compare and contrast to corporations who frankly only care about technology in that it gives them power and money. Anne’s love of nature was expanded to a love of systems, even if they are awkward, bespoke or constrained.
At this point I could insert Anne into a cyberpunk setting. Perhaps she’d go on hacking adventures with her friends. I liked the idea that her main hub would be some community MakerSpace, to lean strongly into that DIY focus.
But I needed one more idea. I wanted something to tie Anne into the cyberpunk world even more strongly.
An aside on philosophy
One aspect of cyberpunk is its science-fiction lineage in which philosophical ideas are explored via the setting. Neuromancer examined cyberspace as the collective unconscious. Blade Runner explored what it meant to be human. The Matrix explored levels of reality and power structures, a la Baudrillard. Ghost in the Shell explored the idea of self as data. Ex Machina explored manipulation, gender and autonomy in AI.
I wanted something similar for this. I’m not a philosopher, I’m just a mathematician who likes writing. (Real philosophers will probably groan at this next bit.) I was aware of a concept from by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guatarri in their books Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. The concept is deterritorialization and reterritorialization. Horrific terms, and don’t make me say them ten times fast. The idea is that you have these social constructs that live in a context, organisational or cultural. These constructs can be changed for better or for worse, destroying the old context and moving the structures to a new one.
In a rough sense it’s “yeah, duh, things change” but it is trying to capture this idea of how things like power structures, identity, and social relationships adapt when forces try to change the reality from under them.
This concept is prime for cyberpunk. There is a fluidity at which reality gets digitized, disseminated and dismantled, accelerated in a cyberpunk near-future. Corporations will happily take things like human connections (social media), wealth (blockchain), knowledge work itself (LLMs) and both destroy the original structure and replace it with something they control or profit from. More cyberpunk-y tropes like body augmentations are a similar idea in a different direction.
Anne’s story (Green Gables) is another form of deterritorialization. She’s an orphan transplanted into the role of ward of the Cuthberts. She goes from unwanted outsider to pillar of the community. The “ugly, freckled, red-haired, piteous girl” becomes the beautiful scholar. She’s still the same Anne, but the context changes and the world changes with it.
Me writing a cyberpunk, interactive adaptation of the pastoral classic novel is another form of deterritorialization/reterritorialization. A lot hinged on this being a constructive and productive change, where it could be easily considered destructive or ignorant.
So I just had to write it.
Writing process
I adopted a similar process to my IF Comp 2023 game, Hand Me Down, but improved. From the outset I had a much stronger plan. I planned out a structure, wrote notes for the chapters, as well as identify points of interactivity. The minigame at the end was planned and prototyped very early, partly to make sure the tech worked before I committed to it (Hand Me Down suffered a little bit due to technology limitations).
The game was split into three acts, and ten chapters. Every chapter had a choice which was echoed in later passages. The acts were named after the process of turning source code into executables (perhaps another form of deterritorialization?) which are Compiling, Assembly and Linking. The chapters somewhat align with this:
- Compiling does a lot of the legwork of translating Green Gables to Green Cables, establishing characters and the world.
- Assembly starts turning those components into plot and StrataCorp’s plan starts to get revealed.
- Linking connects the plot points together towards an ending.
I had planned on three minigames, one for each Act: salvage, rescuing Minnie-May and the smart contract hack at the end. Each of these reflected the philosophical ideas. Salvaging equipment meant recontextualising components and transplanting them. Minnie-May’s VR hack attack is the bad guys deterritorializing her from a kids story to a nightmare, and you having to bring her back to safety via a third place. The smart contract was the only one that remained, and was important for the finale. The idea was that these real world concepts like the corporation StrataCorp and places like Green Cables would be munged up and turned into StrataCorp assets, but with some subtle permutations of the context, they would turn into Anne’s assets. I only did the last one due to time and idea constraints. The first two end up being a different mode of interactivity compared to the rest of the game, almost storylet-style but not quite.
I had recruited my mate Mike from Armiger Games to be my accountability buddy again. I had a structure planned out early and we even had a good schedule. This ended up being a chapter a week, which was too fast if you threw life in the mix. But, as my wife noted, the last push to completion was less of a death march than Hand Me Down. I was relatively relaxed throughout.
The writing itself was hard. L.M. Montgomery is a fantastic writer full of subtlety and carefully chosen words. I didn’t want to take her characters into my own world, so I tried some sort of metamorphosis between her writing and mine. It’s been suggested that I might have taken the Project Gutenberg version, copy-pasted it, and then went through putting Bruce Sterling mirrorshades (or CD Projekt spandex) on everything. No, I typed every single one of those words. Some in reference to the original, but there was a lot of reconfiguration and adjustment. This is tighter to the original at the start of the game but gets looser as it goes along. This gradation was hard, on top of the writing itself. There is also a quickening of pace as you go through, as a sense of getting “more cyberpunk” as it goes through. Plus it starts from being a very linear retelling of the novel to a progressively nonlinear one by rearranging events of the novel and skipping over others.
Montgomery’s original novel is about 97k words, and my game is about 50k. Cables is wider than Gables though, in the way that the game makes little branching scenes. So I will happily admit that (world-renowned, best-selling) Montgomery is the far better writer, though I feel like I still did a decent job with a harder set of constraints.
Moving the story to a cyberpunk future was pretty tricky in the details. I had to figure on a certain level of technology, and settled on something that is near-future but also an alternative future where somehow Prince Edward Island becomes a bulging metropolis.
The sexism in the original was really hard to reconcile and I left some of it in. I removed all of the subtle racism (or replaced it with Canadian disdain for Americans). I had to do a lot of gymnastics to keep Anne’s repeated woe of having red hair. In a cyberpunk future, can’t you just dye it? But as Anne points out, she’d still know she was a red-haired kid, even if she did dye it (again harking back to the philosophy). I was disappointed to leave out the misadventure with black dye, but it just didn’t fit. Similarly but less disappointing for the liniment cake calamity.
I liked the idea of floating farms, which was a future-tech way of only partially isolating the Cuthberts and discussing the intersection of nature vs technology. Turning Mrs Lynde into an influencer seemed to work for the earlier passages, but she changes over the course of the novel and I had no room to do that in the game.
In very early planning I wanted Diana to be a wholly AI friend always at the end of a video call, like a Twitch avatar. Diana “Rasp-” Barry Pi. That doesn’t work for a bunch of reasons, including the fact that there’s Josie Pye. In the end I greatly diminished the idea of AI avatars and leaned more into VR, NFTs, LLMs, Industry 3.0, wearable computing, the gig economy and other digital tech.
One exciting change I made was to make Diana Barry history-focussed. It was a nice mirror to Anne who enjoys the making and existence of things both natural and technological. Diana enjoys data and history, which also makes sense given the Barry’s wealth and standing in the community. Anne is goodness looking forward, and Diana is goodness looking backwards.
The Deleuze/Guattari philosophy gave me a number of opportunities to steal names and imagery. StrataCorp comes from striation and this idea of plateaus of hierarchy. Their corporate HQ (right hand side of the cover art) is inspired by this and a number of buildings I’ve seen that do this layering effect. The Maker space is called The Assemblage, and is designed as an ad hoc combination of new parts and old building, new community and old society, at the middle of AvonLea Commons, which is a rhizomically-structured park in the middle of the city. The hacking tool Gilbert makes for you at the end is called LinesOfFlight, after the philsophical term. Occasionally I’d sneak these terms into the text as a subtle way to signal the connection to the four people on Earth who might notice and care.
Graphics
I did the cover art myself. I’m pretty happy how it turned out, even though its basically that Homer meme:
I had tried to make a lot more art, but turns out art is hard. I had an idea for a lot more interstitial art to decorate the piece and break up the text. Originally I had a good conception of some minimalist impressionist art, but as I wrote that didn’t quite match with the tone.
The credits art is done by a friendly artist in Colombia that I stumbled across, maybe on ko-fi? I commissioned her work early in the process. She was great to work with.
The pixel art and CSS styling is all me. While I wanted more art, I was happy with what I had.
Reception
I’m writing this just as votes close, so I don’t know how it’s gone. The reviews have been in the majority quite positive, especially from other authors in IF Comp. That’s been quite lovely.
Early in the comp I saw quite a few “OMG Anne of Green Gables! I’m such a fan! I’m totally going to play Green Cables!” and then… crickets. And I get it. The idea is weird and potentially polarising from the outset. The first chapter is an intentional barrage and through it all I’m hoping that you realise that I’m Trying To Do A Thing, Please Trust Me. There was a similar issue with Hand Me Down, which was Trying To Do A Thing and hit or miss depending on a million little variables.
My goal during These Times is to make cool things for cool people. From what feedback I got, I did make something that people enjoyed, so that’s great.
I got fewer reviews for Anne than I did with Hand Me Down, but Anne plus Cart got more. Also there were more entries than in 2023. And the generative AI discussion seemed to suck the air and optimism out of the forums. This was a little disappointing given how I focussed on making the game 100% hand-wrought.
I’m hoping Anne beats Hand Me Down by getting at least 16th place. But given the very, very, very strong set of entries, that might be optimistic. If Cart beats Anne I’ll be surprised.
Random notes
Some extra little tidbits to mention:
- I noticed early on that L.M. Montgomery’s initials is really close to generative AI. LMM vs LLM. She uses an inordinate amount of em-dashes, which some people use as a clue to LLM writing. But no, I put them all there myself. I think aping her style has broken my brain now.
- As some reviewers noted, I was not very precise about the ages of characters. They start young in the novel and grow up over years. My game takes place within a year. I was uncomfortable with anything “traditionally” cyberpunk and young girls.
- Similarly Anne’s repeated body issues, which you would think is good fodder for cyberpunk. I just felt uncomfortable about it, given I’m a dad to a daughter. I did lean into the cyber-bullying, though.
- On the flip side, a subtle bit of worldbuilding was that Anne is a contractor to a corporation as a kid. Education and school are basically farmed out to volunteer community groups or as corporate training. In the game The Assemblage is the closest thing they have to a school, but it’s certainly not one.
- I liked that puffy sleeves was a callback to the original, but were wearable computers that allowed Anne to sneak a mini computer into the bad guy’s lair.
- I liked that there were exactly ten chapters, which perhaps subverted expectations when you get to “Chapter 0xA”.
- I experimented with a difficult mathematics experiment trying to come up with an icon to go alongside each chapter heading. The idea was a pixel art drawing of Anne that was the eventual evolution of a Game of Life configuration. Computing this is really hard, especially when you’re trying to do that as well as make the art useful. I ditched that idea.
- Matthew’s pacemaker being unsupported due to intellectual property games was inspired by real-world events (I think bionic eyes?). The mention of StrataCorp woodchippering the IP for tax benefits was inspired by Warner Brothers making and destroying movies before they were released.
- I was disappointed how Marilla turned out. She’s one of my favourites in the book. She’s so strong and subversive. I had to lower her importance for the overall structure of the game. If I made the game about a third longer, I might have wrapped in her blindness angle as yet another relation to corporate shenanigans.
- I had to drop awesome characters like Aunt Josephine. Anne’s classmates were also mostly omitted. Mrs Barry is a negative space character in that she acts with the characters completely off-screen and never gets a direct appearance.
- While the game didn’t have wildly branching narratives until the finale, I did try to recognize and echo previous choices throughout. Matthew observes the machine you repair in the salvage game near the end, for example.
- The structure of the game is a whole bunch of (mostly) binary choices that split and merge frequently. It tickled me no end when I realised that this looks a lot like Anne’s famous braids.
- Cade Stratton, the CEO, is a combination of all those CE-Bros. I tried to come up with a name that was both cyberpunk and annoyed the hell out of me. It worked because I refused to remember his name I hated it so much. Stratton is also a nod towards Strata.
- Some adaptations or fan fiction (fAnne fiction?) lean in on the “are Anne and Diana lesbians?” In concert with the age issues, I didn’t have anything to say on that sort of thing so omitted it entirely. It’s nice to just have female hackers doing stuff without sexualisation.
- Count on the occurrence of the word “bosom”: 14, including once in the CSS.
If Anne of Green Cables encouraged you to look up the original, please do. It’s amazing. You can buy all sorts of text copies. The audiobook with Rachel McAdams is splendid.