UPDATE: Author Jim Nelson beat the odds in Division 2’s Round 1 when 39th seed According to Cain bested 10th seed A Beauty Cold and Austere. We caught up with him before he left for his victory party, and he agreed to answer a few questions…
Q: What was it about the Cain and Abel story that attracted you as a subject?
JN: Two brothers fighting over the affection of their parents and their place in the world, a family banished to the wilderness, the murder, the punishment—it’s so mythic and yet familiar and relevant. Incredibly, the source material is only about fifteen sentences long. The porous openings in the original story gave me handholds into it.
Q: Were any other games particular inspirations for According to Cain? If so, which one(s) and how?
JN: My inspiration was mostly drawn from literature and the source texts. I obviously had some classic IF in the back of my mind, such as Enchanter’s approach to magic, and the expansiveness of City of Secrets and Starcross.
Q: The inspiration for the crow appears to be a passage from the Quran. What function did you intend the crow to serve in the story?
JN: The passage in the Quran with the crow is powerful, and I knew I had to include it. That inspired me to have the crow play a key role in the final moments of the story. Crows are funny little creatures, and it also gave me the opportunity to inject a little light comedy, which was not planned at all.
Q: Opinions are divided in the community about the merits of including music and other sound in interactive fiction. Why did you decide to include music in According to Cain?
JN: I appreciate people’s reservations about music in IF, and so I made sure the player only hears it if they want it—opt-in, instead of opt-out.
My decision to include music is entirely due to my love of film and video game soundtracks. I jumped at the opportunity to design a soundtrack with music cued off the player’s choices and discoveries.
Q: As the lone entry built using the TADS 3 development toolset, your game is the standard bearer for it. What made you choose that tool, and are there any other tools that interest you?
JN: In a way, TADS chose me. Back in 1998 or 1999, I played Ian Finley’s Babel, was impressed with its implementation, and downloaded the TADS 2 toolkit. That led me to rec.arts.int-fiction and Stephen Granade’s about.com IF page. I had no idea there was an active IF writing community until then.
Q: IFDB shows only one other game listed as yours: Past Present. Is there anything you would like to say about it?
JN: That was a short title I wrote to go through the process of taking a TADS parser game from concept to completion. I languished when I realized how long Cain was going to take, and I needed a creative break.
I’ve thought about revisiting Past Present on a larger scale some day. In some ways, that story remains unfinished.