writing

New cafe

  • Reading time:2 mins read

the hardest part of writing isn’t finding what to say, or working out how to say it. Once you’re on that level, unless you’ve already written your thing and you’re just going back through with an editor’s hand, you’re stuck.

The hardest thing is finding the mood. In preparing yourself to pour into the template that you’ve built for yourself. Actual writing — actual expression — can’t be constructed, intellectually. It’s a flow of the unconscious — of all one’s training, working out of instinct. And either it happens or it doesn’t.

In a sense, every creative process is a performance. The play is perhaps the most fundamental expressive form. Every other medium is just some sort of an adaptation. Prose is effectively a depersonalized script. Film, a cemented performance. Music, an abstracted performance. Videogames — well, they’re just theater again.

In their particapatory qualities, they are — ironically considering the gestalt nature of their literal makeup — one of the more primal, more basic forms. Or, no. I suppose that reversal — the improvisational, active interpretation element being the audience’s purview — is what makes the form postmodern.

Which is interesting. If play is the most basic form, then videogames are post-play, or play 2.0. They’re the post-structuralist theater — which may explain some of the difficulty in illustrating with them. It’s the difference between following a car from the front, as compared to the back.

I am not a natural performer. My skills of improvisation are weak, unpracticed. Yet as uncomfortable as I am, going off-script, I have very little patience for scripts. I recall in my few acting lessons, every performance became an impromptu improvisation, if for noting more than boredom. What’s been written has already been done, and probably done poorly. It”s more interesting to take the script as a thematic starting place and whittle out my own story. In retrospect, considering how hard I find it just to talk to people on the phone, I don’t know where I found that energy.

I need to get over this intellectualism.

On the Outside: An Informal Look into Silent Hill 4

  • Reading time:3 mins read

by [name redacted]

Today’s post is brought to you by Andrew Toups and the letter Æ.

People complain about Henry’s personality. I don’t get it. I mean, I do. There seems to be this idea that The Room is substantially more character-based than the earlier games, and that the tendency toward supreme understatement in all parties somehow undermines what emotional potential there might be. I don’t know how true that is, though. Taking the game for what it is, I get the idea that the characters are distant because they’re distant. Because that’s the nature of our interaction, as the player and as Henry Townsend.

See, Henry is a strangely normal guy; in a way, more typical than either Harry or James. He doesn’t have a dead wife and a lost daughter. He doesn’t have a dead wife and a crushing sense of guilt. He just has a bottle of white wine and a carton of chocolate milk in his fridge. He has no particular problems, outside his current predicament. Although compassionate for his part, he maintains his distance. As far as others are concerned, Henry’s role is of the bemused observer.

Although he’s not just a foil, Henry is a parallel for the player. You might call him a bit of a Raiden. Think of his circumstances in terms of Myst — with the Malkovich-holes in place of linking books. Notice how much of the game involves peeping — Henry, taking in his world indirectly, which we in turn take in indirectly through Henry. That is, except for the portions in room 302. Those, the most overtly Myst-like, we experience in the first-person. It is only when we leap through the holes, back into the game world, that Henry returns as a buffer.

In his relationship with others, Henry continues this role. He’s nice enough a person; it’s just, this isn’t his world. He’s busy living the life of the mind. Even when he’s standing next to Eileen, he’s still peeping. He’s not really there. He’s just watching.

It is this distance, and the safety it provides, which the game later tries to dissolve — for Henry and the player alike. When the game notices Henry is when it notices the player. When the darkness intrudes into room 302, it is intruding into the player’s own perceived safe space, where there is no Henry to fall back on.

For my part, I would find Henry’s conversations jarring if they were any less zoned-out. I would be distracted if the human relationships were any more satisfying. That would be too perfect. Perfection ruins any illusion. Henry would cease to be so very normal. He would become someone special. And he’s not. He’s no hero. He’s barely a protagonist. He’s just a twentysomething guy with white wine in his fridge. And at the end, Henry has resolved no personal problems. He remains the guy he always was. He just needs a new apartment.

Passing the message

  • Reading time:1 mins read

I just wrote the following on the rear of a five-dollar bill. The modern kind, you know, with all the white space.

When I was little
I knew a woman
who would give me
candy fish from a jar.
Her name was Helen.
She owned a fruit store
on main street.
Her voice had a rasp.
Her lip had a mustache.
When she gave change,
she did the math out
on a notepad
on the counter,
one step at a time.
She itemized each item.
She mouthed its name.
She looked to me
for affirmation.
I stared back.
Helen is dead now.
Her store is gone.
I still enjoy candy fish.