Didn’t see this posted, but Michael Bywater passed away in August of last year.
I discovered this a couple of days ago. And since then I have been thinking, I should start a thread, I should say something. I really don’t know what to say. He wrote/contributed to a game that I like a great deal (Jinxter) and that, more than any of the other Magnetic Scrolls games, drives home “Britain is a foreign country,” or at least it seemed that way to me, being a teenager in suburbia in western NY at the time. Everything inside that Jinxter box is fascinating.
I can list things I have read - he partially inspired the character of Dirk Gently, my favorite Douglas Adams character, and I would have bet everything I had that I’d never read another DNA character I liked more than Zaphod before he introduced us to Dirk. Michael got Bureaucracy over the line & so much more, and of course, from the perspective of a text game player, he was prominent in the comments when information on the Infocom hard drive was made public. He was right to be upset about it, I’d have maybe been nicer about it in his place, but I’d have felt the same way if that had happened to me.
I get the sense he hated bad design in the world. I have been there. The thing everyone comes back to with his writing, aside from the intelligence and sarcasm, is the cynicism. You cannot let cynicism take over your life, because you will eventually be made to realize that they keep making more fuel for it. They never run out. An object description in Bureaucracy has a bit about a credit card sending you a wallet to entice you to apply for a credit card, a credit card you already have from a credit card company threatening you with action for not paying your bill that you, of course, paid weeks ago. That’s funny. That’s barely fiction. I work in web payments and I try to apply for cards when I can so I have an awareness of what payment service processors and creditors are doing, what the experience of using their products are like. Nothing has changed in 35 years from what Michael wrote up above. In the process of getting a Wells Fargo card - a company famous world-wide for constantly and unrepentantly breaking the law - I had to spend two hours in person at one of their branches while the manager of that branch called three different WF employees to confirm who I am. Reader, my credit score is 835. They could have locked me in the branch for three days and I wouldn’t have taken the free suckers. Bywater was correct to have had a rage toward these systems - put in a bit about having to struggle to communicate with an AI agent and Bureaucracy could be released as new and fresh tomorrow.
But you can’t let it take over your life, you will never win. I have no idea if he was pretty laid back in real life and if he just adopted a persona for his writing. He is someone I respected a great deal and always kept tabs on what he was up to, but from afar - he was someone whose work I enjoyed and I never wanted to meet him because it would have messed me up if I agitated him or rubbed him the wrong way.
I wish he had done more IF, I wish that the market was such that we could have had him create more. I think our hobbies and interest here is best when we have a wide and diverse set of auteurs and writers and raconteurs doing their thing and putting us in their world and creating a fiction for us to interact within. If you are not feeling up for sarcasm and cruel wit, that is ok, you can play a game that evening by Dave Lebling or Paul O’Brian or Adam Thornton. But if you are… well, he had a couple games for you, narmean?
This is another article by Jimmy Maher about his life, which I find fascinating. (The life and the article.)
I don’t have a take on what happens to us after we die. If the concept of the pearly gates is true, I hope for the sake of everyone working that day August of last year the line went quickly. I hope the process is efficient, that there is some sense to it. Because if there is not, whooooooo, the one guy who would let them know about it and make them feel like dogshit for being bad at their jobs that they’ve had millennia to improve upon, while making the rest of us laugh would be Michael Bywater.