Your Homosexual Lover Is In Another Castle – A Year of Interviews With Jeffrey Auburn, #1
 BY ERIC LOCKABY
FEB
In the icy heliopause between Jeffrey Auburn’s kitchen window and the antique Arvin buzzing at our feet, I can’t help but wonder if maybe he’s just full of shit. “We’re not artists,” he says, sucking feverishly at a cigarette, the latest in a series that have left me bear-hugging myself for warmth, “Unknown writers…Unknown game developers. We’re just another kind of tradesman…faceless; thankless. And yet tradesman implies a need, does it not? a demand that our work satisfies. Obviously this is not the case.” Jeffrey douses his cigarette in the sink and slams the window shut. Immediately the little Arvin heliosphere expands to fill the room. For the first time in twenty minutes, my fingers experience something comparable to sensation; in a blood-flush, my critical mind returns…
…”So you’re saying that we’re what, piss-poor tradesmen?”
“I’m saying we’re tradesmen of an era that hasn’t happened yet.”
That’s exactly the kind of statement that bugs me about him. Auburn, you see, a Georgia-based “indie unknown” who has in the last ten years designed and programmed a dozen games in his spare time, games that as of this publication have not yet seen the light of day, isn’t working in the Commodore days. This is 2010, when the opportunities for independent developers to distribute and promote their work are vast. If these games are worth seeing, I can’t help but ask myself…why haven’t they been?
“Release is more complicated than that…There are multiple forms of it. Untouchability is one of them. In this age of substantiation, of instantaneous fact-checking, I feel the drive to make a fiction of the real. If there is a horizon to Truth, my work exists along the vanishing point. That which we cannot touch becomes mysterious. I want there to be once again fiction in the world.”
Ah. The burden of the diligently unseen. Boo-hoo. And yet I cannot resist addressing the glaring contradiction: Jeffrey, you see, called moi.
…He seems hurt by this line of questioning. “Just because I don’t want to release my work doesn’t mean I don’t want it to exist. Your witnessing makes my work real. Your reporting will make it realer. But the buck stops there. By placing you between readers and reality, fiction emerges. Can’t you see that I’m doing you a favor? When we first talked you said you just wanted to expose the world. Well now I’ve given you two.”
* * *
In many ways, Your Homosexual Lover Is In Another Castle, Auburn’s 2008 creation, is a complete mess. But it’s also the game that he claims has helped him understand the trajectory of his work; that’s helped him begin to conceive of his work as having momentum, a momentum that his next game (his last, he says) will conclude. With the controller in hand I begin to play. Auburn, lingering at my elbow, can’t resist enlightening me:
“…I was thinking about speedrunning culture. You know, where people compete to get their total time down, carefully exploiting glitches in the game world, until, over the course of months or even years in some cases, they gradually shape the original game into something much smaller. As if it were some new kind of stoneworking. And yet, in stonework we’re shaping raw material inward; speedrunners begin with a finished product. So what are they doing exactly? Are they making the game more finished? better finished? Or are they simply working a product back into its raw material again?”
 Things begin normal enough. No counters. No lives. “It was with this in mind that I decided to un-build Super Mario Bros. So I spent a few months knocking around in there, listening for the thud of structure behind the walls. And when I found it, I started cutting. I cut the timer. I cut the score. I pared the stages back, so that there was only World One left, which I looped, Finnegans Wake-style. And still I could hear the structure behind the game. Could feel its deep contours taunting me. So I cut harder. I washed out the colors. I flipped the layout of the stages. I stripped out the music. I cut and cut, until I felt bone. And still I wasn’t happy. I almost gave up a few times. I nearly scrapped the entire goddamn thing.”
 ...I do learn, however, that Goombas are deadly no “And then it hit me. I was making a game about death within a game in which death meant nothing. Or very little anyway. So I went back to the drawing board. I looked at the game with a new question: How might I give death consequence?”
 ...I try to leave the past behind but it gives chase. Before “Of what consequence is death in games? In most, it’s merely a setback. Usually we get to start again on the same board. A few games, newer games—Passage, Braid, Minecraft—they break that habit. Of the three, Minecraft is the great balancer: unlike the other two, death “happens,” but it happens as part of the thread of the world. Death in Minecraft is just another one of its liberties with physics. These are games that are not content with the Game Over conception of death. In these games, death is feelable.”
 ...Because these artifacts, you see, are more than just “We might wonder where this habit came from, but we already know the answer: the need for capital. Games were built for coins; early on in the evolution of games, “losing” was commodified. Even in SMB, we collect coins to what end? to cash them in for extra lives. It worries me that this conceptualization of death has persisted. I wonder, How might one compete with a capitalistic structure that has defined the tradition itself?
“You’ll notice that in my game the coins are still in. They weren’t, but I put them back. Why? Because people will still collect them. Out of habit.”
 Oh more deaths now, as I try to navigate these multiple worlds. As well, the threat of becoming trapped in a sudden “I wanted death to be incorporated into the forward motion of the game itself. I presented death as a mistake made tangible. The player must learn to navigate the effects of the past on the present. And thus was born Another Castle’s one and only goal: to never stop. Unlike many other games where the end comes abruptly, the end here has been adding up over the course of the player’s life…Until suddenly it hits you: “Oh shit, it’s all over.”
 At which point I discover this other-Mario's only weakness...confinement. Overwhelmed by my past, * * *
I hate this world of mine. My mistakes swarm before and around me. I lose sight of the past and the present. Tense becomes indistinguishable. Frustrated, I push the controller away. For a moment I sit stewing.
“What,” I begin, knowing that it’s rude to not have anything to say, “is the purpose of sexuality in the game?”
Jeffrey clutches at his own arms. “It’s autobiographical,” he says sheepishly.
* * *
Games are not as different as you think they are. From other mediums, I mean.
The difference that people usually cling to is the notion of “interactivity”—games, people argue, allow us to engage in another world; to act within them in an entirely new way. But the truth is that the difference between successfully navigating a game world and successfully comprehending a work of prose (let’s says it’s fiction, and let’s say it’s quality fiction) is only a matter of degrees, and is only a difference of evolution.
For when we play and read, we are doing so at the invitation of a fundamental structure which runs diligently behind the curtain. In the way that we must learn when to jump a gap in 1-1, we must learn to jump to a conclusion in Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying; and in the way that we learn to react to a change in an enemy’s patterns, we learn to react to changes in a character’s speech patterns. The realization that an enemy’s barrage of missiles is a cycle; the realization that a character’s staccato bursts of dialogue are meant to imply a change in mood. These are realizations that both developer and author can build into their work.
Even the physicality of games, that feeling of “experiencing” a virtual world, is present, in its degree, in prose…Give a reader a tense scene and his pulse will rise. Present a reader with a section of Stream of Consciousness writing and he will “feel” the slippery nature of the narrator’s own sense of time. Or at least to much the same degree that we might say a gamer “feels” the gameworld.
Both games and prose present themselves to us as potentiality spaces, within which we are allowed to make decisions…to “play.” Furthermore, any “playing” that we do consists mostly of tricks that we’ve adapted from the real world. Approaching for the first time the first gap in SMB’s 1-1, I didn’t need to experiment much to discover what needed to be done. Without even thinking about it, I coupled the notions of moving forward, of jumping, and of crossing gaps in a way that was not all that dissimilar from the actual world of moving forward, of jumping, of crossing gaps. And this is as well true of my first dealings with prose: in order to sympathize with a character, in order to comprehend the gravity of a situation, I had to have some understanding of real world “mechanics”…How else would I have recognized that a character was angry, or that a situation was dire?
Lest being told so explicitly by the author, I suppose, a prose-world that would be as stagnant and as tedious to read as a hamster-tubed game is to play.
Both mediums allow us to interact in a range of meaningful ways. In 1-1, I can not only kill a goomba, but I can kill him in a variety of ways: I can do so with a stomp; I can do so with a well-timed slide; did I pick up the invincibility powerup? if so I can just run right through him; or what about the fireball powerup? In all cases the ultimate fate of the goomba will be the same, and the gameworld, in nearly all cases, will not be affected by the decision. Let’s not forget that I could have simply evaded him.
And so it is with the prose-world: I am allowed to imagine All the King’s Men’s Willie Stark with a wild tuft of hair covering his eyes during a speech; I can dream a multitude of colors into an otherwise un-described room; even the decision to side or not side with the various characters in prose is (often) up to me. These interactions are inconsequential to my actual progress.
But there are others that are of a more grave nature: in narrative-based games these major interactions are often boiled down to the “moral decision,” but even in a game such a Passage, where the narrative is generated by the player (in so much as the player’s narrative will be about moving or not moving in a direction within the span of five minutes…which is the fundamental structure of the game), there are moments in which one decision might feel more significant than another.
And I’m not simply deploying the “Choose Your Own Adventure” argument here, an argument that contends that prose can (though less efficiently) allow readers to change the outcome of the narrative (do remember, however, that many of the big decisions of, say, the Mass Effect series could be replicated in the prose-world in just this way.) I am talking about that other form of agency that both a player and a reader have: interpretive agency.
Though the term can be loosely applied to the even the most basic of game/prose interactions, we should learn to think of our more meaningful interactions within a potentiality space as interpretation. Deciding to go back and pick up the companion in Passage; beginning to conceive of Moby-Dick’s Ishmael as a homosexual. Both interpretation are “allowed,” insofar as both interactions can be legitimately made; and both significantly alter the way in which we engage with the gameworld or prose-world…and yet neither are required.
So might we imagine meaningful interactions such as these that are required? Sure. In prose, though I might have page-by-page constructed a potential for Blood Meridian’s “the kid” (as he is known) to survive unscathed and to live happily ever after…the text itself eventually puts this interpretation to rest. Might we say this is akin to missing a jump in 1-1? In order to progress, I have to re-conceive of the world. Or rather, I have to conceive better.
When I decide to kill or not kill a goomba; when I decide that Hamlet is or is not insane; my decision is based upon the allowability of that decision within a potentiality space (the very reason I can’t, for instance, imagine Batman into Ulysses). If I go too far, it’s back to square one. “Have fun,” we might imagine these worlds saying to us, “But mind the grass.”
* * *
I understand you have a problem with this idea: misinterpreting a passage of Don DeLillo never, ever means starting the book over. You’re absolutely right—in prose, I am allowed to misinterpret, to interact “poorly,” to little immediate effect. Sure, some sections might be confusing. But I can still progress. Whereas in games, a poor interpretation of a jump will prevent me (in most cases) from moving on until I get it right.
And yet, I can envision a scenario in which this would be true in prose: I imagine reading with DeLillo sitting nearby, eying me guardedly. At this or that interval, Ol’ Don will tap me on the shoulder and shove a quiz he has prepared into my hands. This quiz will include questions that pertain to plot, theme, symbols…anything he feels is crucial to a “proper” interpretation. After I take this quiz, he will grade it. If I get the questions right, I can keep reading. But if I don’t…it’s back to the beginning for you, Eric. Or at the very least back to the beginning of the chapter.
The reason for this should be obvious. DeLillo is not there when I read his work, and try as I might he cannot be conjured up either. This is the very idea that Roland Barthes discussed in his 1967 essay “The Death of the Author.” Barthes was concerned with the legitimacy of an author’s authority on a work that he or she actually created. Often, especially before post-structuralists such as Barthes, readers would concede their interpretations to that of the author’s. The rationale, I suppose, was that since the author wrote the damn thing, the author must have the right ideas.
Barthes argued that the author’s opinion of a work, especially if it were his own, was merely a side-effect of the author being a reader himself. Moreover, an author’s interpretation, should we take it to be gospel, places a limit on a text, which is unacceptable. Relying on the author’s intentions assumes that the meaning of a text is merely “included” within the text, not interpreted…as if meaning were just a secret room that our clever author has concealed within the body of the text, and that a good reader has only to discover. As well, there is the obvious issue with relying on an author’s interpretation, which is that author’s die…”safe-guarding” the Truth of a text within an author seems silly in this way, since an author will vanish long before the text itself will.
And it is at this point that we might finally begin to stumble back towards Another Castle, and to begin to understand the True difference between games and prose.
We might call it Active Criticism: the ability of a game to punish misinterpretation; to transmit the interpretive wishes of its author. When we make a “mistake” reading DeLillo, we are not forced to return to a previous point, nor to re-interpret. Yet with games, the fundamental structure laid out by the developer can force this very thing upon the player. “Misinterpreting” a jump means re-interpreting it again and again until I get it right. It is only then that I might move forward. That scenario I described earlier, in which DeLillo sits waiting for me to screw up…that’s the reality with most games.
“You Died” is the End of Interpretation; “Game Over” the do-not-pass-go. It’s the developer, the creator, the author, taking his audience by the thumbs and saying, “No, no, no—that’s the wrong interpretation. Do it again.”
* * *
Your Homosexual Lover Is In Another Castle, in that the player is asked to deal with his previous mistakes, works completely against this idea. In the world Auburn has created, death is simply another kind of memory. But saying “simply” implies that his argument is to de-value death. On the contrary, Auburn merely wants death within the game to appear as it does to he who plays the game: as a player-generated narrative of their own—even if unfortunate—design.
Of course, I’m not thinking this when I leave Jeffrey’s apartment that night. I’m thinking of the long drive back to Atlanta I have to make; I’m thinking of whether or not I’ll ever return to this little unknown studio; I’m thinking of how goddamn cold it is. But as the weeks pass, these feelings fade away from the background: in my day to day, I think only of honesty, and how hard it has become to find in my life.
* * *
Six months later, during another interview, while viewing another game, Jeffrey will tell me that he’s found a copy of an intro he’d once written for Another Castle. “It’s in here somewhere…” he’ll say, rifling through a box of notes. The label on the box will tell a story of its own, in variations of the game’s title which will still be visible beneath a gloss of Sharpie ink: SMB:MINUS; SMB:THE BIG MISTAKE; SMB:SMB:SMB:SMB…
“Here it is,” he’ll say, removing from the box a crumbled note-card, on which the original intro will be scrawled. Then Jeffrey will clear his throat the way I’ll discover that he does sometimes when he’s nervous; he’ll kind of stand there with lips pursed, then push back his shabby hair where it’s gotten in his eyes. And finally he’ll speak:
This here’s the story of a homo abandoned by his author. I can’t help you
now little homo. I know your lover’s in here somewhere, but I
can’t tell you where. Or what where means.
The reality of the world has evaded me. It’s here somewhere, I just know it.
—
Next Month: _______ ON THE PLANET X
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That was a top notch essay.
But FUCK YOU JEFFREY, LET US PLAY THE DAMN GAME!!!!!!!!!
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