Author J. J. Guest’s magnum opus, Alias ‘The Magpie’, significantly beat the odds when it won its Round 1 match against #6 seed Cragne Manor. Although scheduling problems delayed the interview, he graciously took the time to answer several questions in-depth for the edification of fans. We think you’ll agree that it was worth the wait…
Q: You have an extensive background in theater. How much has your experience on and around the stage influenced the design of your games?
JJG: I wouldn’t say my theatre experience was extensive–far from it! I got into improvisational comedy (Improv) in 2015 primarily because I hoped it would help my writing. By that point I’d already been writing IF for 15 years. I had done some amateur dramatics in my youth–I played Marvin the Paranoid Android in a school production of Hitch-Hikers and I have a couple of LAMDA exam certificates (grade 5 with distinction and grade 6 with honours!) but when I started writing Alias I hadn’t trodden the boards in years. Did the improv experience make a difference? I can’t say it really did, because it’s a completely different process from writing. In an improv show you’re reacting to your fellow improvisers (and the audience) and saying the first thing that comes into your head. Writing is much more considered, and you have the luxury of time. If I’d been able to come up with the kind of witty retorts the Magpie is capable of on stage then I’d be one heck of an improviser! Those kinds of lines come to me at three o’clock in the morning or when I’m in the bath.
I still perform occasionally, in an award-winning children’s storytelling show called The Extraordinary Time-Travelling Adventures of Baron Munchausen. Performing for children is terrifying though, so I don’t volunteer for many shows.
Q: Inform 7 appears to be your preferred tool, and it makes use of certain theatrical metaphors (e.g. on-stage/off-stage, backdrops, scenes) in describing some of its built-in tools for authors. Do you find that these tools map well to real-life theater? Do you use them in your games?
JJG: I think they’re useful metaphors in that writing a parser game (for me, anyway) is a little like directing a play–you have to make sure that all the players are in the right place at the right time. Alias ‘The Magpie’ has a relatively small map and most of the characters move around it at various points in the game. I made extensive use of scenes and each scene has its own unique rules. There’s one scene where Hamcester’s prize bull, Sparkenhoe, ends up in the saloon, and during that scene you can enter the saloon from any of three directions, but you can only leave the way you came in (the reasoning being that it’s too dangerous to cross the room). This was important from a storytelling point of view because it gets Lord Hamcester out of his office, which you need to search, but you can only arrive there by entering the house via the first floor and sneaking down the stairs behind his back. It took a devil of a long time to work all this stuff out, and I think the rooms changed relative positions half a dozen times during the early stages of production. The layout of the map was crucial. There could only be one entrance to the collection room and the music room, or things started to get very complicated, and those two rooms switched places quite late on in the process.
A lot of the scenes could happen in different orders, so I had to write several versions of each that took into account what had or had not happened before. That took a lot of working out!
Q: You’ve said that you worked on Alias ‘The Magpie’ off and on for eleven years. How many hours (or person-years) total do you think you put into it?
JJG: It’s very hard to say, as I didn’t keep records! It’s actually longer than that, because the end game (where the Magpie finds himself in the gorilla enclosure at London Zoo) was actually written in 2002, as the opening to a completely different game called Gorilla Suit. But I often work on two or three games at once, and when I run out of steam with one I’ll jump onto another one for a while, so it wasn’t eleven years of continuous work. But even so, Alias took hundreds and hundreds of hours.
Q: You’ve described the work as a “labor of love.” Tell us about the love for which you labored: Why do you love interactive fiction? What makes it different from other narrative arts in your mind?
I think what makes IF unique for me is the relationship the author has with the reader. One of the most fun things about parser IF in particular is that the player can try all sorts of absurd things, and when the author has anticipated that very thing and written a witty response, well that’s magical, and a laugh out loud moment if the game is a comedy. So it has that in common with Improvised Comedy–the interaction with the audience–even though you’re not interacting with them live.
Q: Your most popular works have all been comedies. What is it about comedies that draw you to them as an author? What do you consider to be the greatest challenge(s) when writing comedic IF, and what do you think is the key to overcoming it/them?
JJG: I believe that life is fundamentally absurd. The universe is a kind of divine nonsense. None of us really knows why we’re here or what is really going on, but we all just get on with it as though it was all perfectly normal. There is a very good essay by the philosopher Alan Watts on the writer G. K. Chesterton, in which he says:
“Chesterton’s view of the world is an essentially musical view, a dancing view of the world, in which the object of the creation is not some far-off divine event which is the goal, but the object of the creation is the kind of musicality of it, the very nonsense of it as it unfolds… and the whole idea, therefore, then, is that existence itself is a magical play, and it’s therefore nonsense in the sense–the special sense of nonsense–that it is something going on which does not refer to anything except itself.”
Some people take the view that comedy games can’t deal with serious issues, but I don’t think that’s true. When I came up with the idea for the third game in the To Hell in a Hamper series, I asked myself, why do I keep wanting to tell this story again and again? And I had a strange dream that night, and I woke up in a sweat with my heart pounding and the realisation that the series is about climate change. The boat, or the balloon, is planet Earth, and the Booby character represents global capitalism. Booby won’t let go of his weighty possessions, but if he doesn’t, he’ll die, and his travelling companion with him. Well, that’s all the rich nations, unable to let go of economic growth, or the oil companies wanting to carry on drilling, in denial of the peril it’s put us all in. And I’ve been worried about that and it’s somehow manifested itself as this series of games. A lot of my games are about letting go of things that no longer serve us.
There is comedy in every situation. While I was finishing Alias ‘The Magpie’, I lost both of my parents to cancer. Even at the very end, when they were full of pain and fear, they were making jokes. Very dark jokes, it has to be admitted. We’re quite a dark humour family generally and even more so, it seems, when staring death in the face. But laughter is fundamental to me, and fundamental to life, and any film or book that doesn’t contain any humour simply isn’t true to life.
Q: You seem familiar with the catalog of Wodehouse’s novels. Are there any other authors from past centuries that you would recommend? If so, what can they teach writers of today?
JJG: I’m a sucker for a prose stylist. I like any author who you can identify from a single sentence. The early 20th century was full of these. One was Damon Runyon, who wrote in a distinctive vernacular style now known as Runyonese. Between Runyon and Wodehouse you have an extensive lexicon of early 20th century slang. Wodehouse covered the argot of the upper classes of England, while Runyon evoked the hustlers, gangsters and wise guys of New York during the Prohibition era.
Another one I love is Raymond Chandler. Chandler shared with Wodehouse a love of the colourful simile. I found an article once which presented the reader with a selection of quotes and invited the reader to guess which were written by Wodehouse and which by Chandler. It’s not easy! On the face of it, that’s quite surprising, because one wrote whimsical, quintessentially English comedies of manners, the other wrote hard-boiled detective novels set in LA. But there are many similarities between their writing styles, and there’s a good reason for this! When Chandler was a boy living in Plattsmouth, Nebraska, his alcoholic father absented himself and his mother took him off to London to live with his grandparents so that he might get a better education. Chandler attended Dulwich College, where he was four years below P. G. Wodehouse! Both were taught English by Arthur Herman Gilkes, the then-legendary headmaster of Dulwich College. Gilkes was known for his love of language and it is likely that both authors gained their love of colourful similes from Gilkes.
The comic book writer and artist, George Herriman, is another writer I admire for his playful use of language. Herriman created the long-running newspaper comic Krazy Kat. Herriman was a lover of alliteration. One cartoon from 1935 begins thusly:
“In the diamond dazzle of white meza’s beaute blanche, a weeping willow droops adrip with tears–keeping at flood a lachrymal lagoon–upon whose aqueous bounty a water-melon has thriven into a magnitudinous maturity.”
That’s just one example chosen at random–Herriman wrote and drew Krazy Kat from 1913 until his death in 1944–31 years! Krazy theirself is considered an early example of a non-binary or gender-fluid character in fiction–their gender is kept deliberately ambiguous. Their speech is peppered with malapropisms, metaplasmus and nonsensical phrases, it has a dreamlike quality to it.
I cannot talk about prose stylists without mentioning Clark Ashton Smith, the least-known of the Weird Tales holy trinity. There is no other author who, since I reached adulthood, has had me running to the dictionary more often. If Lovecraft’s and Howard’s prose was purple, Smith’s was purpureal. (It is simply a grander, and more archaic word for purple, and of course I learned it from Smith!)
I could go on and on. My childhood hero was Norman Hunter, who wrote the Professor Branestawm stories. Hunter was the biggest influence on my developing prose style during my formative years. There’s no one else I can think of who can write farcical action scenes with such aplomb, except perhaps G. K. Chesterton. You feel as though you’ve been swept up helplessly into Branestawn’s crazy world. Then there’s R. E. Raspe, eighteenth century author of The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, who wrote in a sort of racy staccato, precisely the right cadence for a military man and adventurer. If I was to write fanfic I would probably choose Branestawm or Munchausen as my subjects…
Q: In your postmortem, you cite Infocom’s Moonmist as a kind of anti-influence by virtue of the abject failure of its NPCs to realistically react to the antics of the PC. Several reviews of Alias ‘The Magpie’ cite the reactivity of the NPCs specifically as one of its strengths, and you cite it as a major component of the work that went into the game. Were there any techniques or tools that you had to invent to make it possible? Were you able to fully realize your vision here, or did you have to scale back from even grander ambitions?
JJG: Emily Short’s short game A Day for Fresh Sushi was a big influence. I had a rulebook that identified certain behaviours as notable and had characters make comments if you carried them out in their presence. Another thing was that I had non-player characters initiate conversations as you walk into a room, because that just seemed realistic. Too often in parser games, NPCs won’t speak until they’re spoken to, which seems quite odd to me. I also had the NPCs move around a fair bit. It’s their home, so there’s no reason they would spend the whole game in one room.
I always like to give characters a paragraph to themselves that comes before the list of portable objects. That paragraph should ideally give a brief description of where the character is in the room and what they’re doing. Are they sitting, standing? What are they sitting on? I’ve played games which were otherwise excellent, but in which the characters appeared in the list of nondescript objects, which seems very odd to me. You wouldn’t describe a room as containing “a table, a chair and your aunt Beryl”, although that does sound funny now that I’ve written it! It’s even worse if it says, “a table, your aunt Beryl and a chair." People are important, so I try to give them importance in my room descriptions. I also like to change the description, have them get out of the chair and lean on the mantelpiece. It makes them seem more alive, and it makes the room description more interesting to re-read. An interesting room description is even more important in a one-room game, so I took it even further in To Sea in a Sieve.
Other than that, it was little things like having Lord Hamcester get up and close the study door if you leave it open, and Hives the butler politely excusing himself if you ignore him. It was a case of going through the game scene by scene, thinking about each character and their motivation for that scene, and having them act accordingly.
I would have liked to have gone a lot further with it than I did. A lot further. If I’d done everything I wanted to do, I’d still be writing the game now!