Raymond Carver vs. the Mortality of Man – A Year of Interviews With Jeffrey Auburn, #3

It’s more accurate to say I fell towards Jeffrey—not walking so much as tumbling, passed like a gallstone through the body of the festival crowd. My sense of direction clings to a half-sighting of The Man Himself somewhere on the other end, long obscured by a hundred undulating torsos. The band starts up; a raucous, shit-kicking number. I feel lost here, and if not for the clack-clack-clack of the snare drum reverberating off the dusty heights of downtown Macon, I could easily imagine that I have slipped through space and time into, well…Redneck Hell. “There’s your proof,” says Jeffrey, pulling me out of the crowd, cigarette still dangling from his lips.

     “Proof of what?”

     “That narrative is alive and well,” he says, pointing to the crowd. “These fine people just authored you.”

     We take a walk. Up and down Cherry St. (the very place that served as our hub in last month’s _____ On the Planet X) the festival part of Macon’s Cherry Blossom Festival is wrapping up and the Street Party portion is just beginning. Far as the eye can see, the tents of nick-nack merchants coming down, only to be quickly replaced with beer vendors. Jeffrey frowns. “Narrative is inherent to structure, kinda like sleeps in it. The trinket tents go down; the booze tents come up. We can’t tell that story; it tells itself. All we can do is convey it, to pass the narrative from our experience to another’s. A lot of developers, the artsy-fartsy kind, they bemoan narrative in games. Say it oppresses players. This is strange to me: to claim that one is at fault for ‘forcing’ a narrative upon another person is to presuppose that the narrative wasn’t equally ‘forced’ upon the author to begin with. Where exactly do we think these narratives come from? out of thin air, like magic? Wrong. Narrative comes out of the structures around us, and to believe that one’s art is exclusively the product of one’s ambition is a fallacy. They’ve got a name for that kind of magic: vanity.”

     Under our feet, the crushed remnants of petals, the smell of them rising up to mingle with the human odor all around. We settle down beneath a row of cherry blossoms a block across from the festival and Jeffrey unpacks his laptop. “I understand that their intentions are only to free players from ‘forced narrative,’ and I can certainly empathize with that. My problem is that I’m not sure what else there is. Existence, you see, is a ‘forced narrative.’ Sorry ‘bout that. Even in the laxest conditions there will still be constraints: RAM; time; mortality. Always something that nudges the player. We can say, ‘Well, just remove that then,’ but I’m not sure what you’d remove. There’s no button that brings structure to the world, and there’s not one that can unstructure it neither. Hell, even the lack of structure at this point would be just another kind of structure. We can’t go back. Nothing and no one can erase it. I’m not sure what you’d find under it anyway.”

…“Do you remember the first thing I ever said to you? I said that you and I were not artists but tradesmen. Tradesmen of what? You never asked. Truth is, I didn’t know. But this morning it hit me: We’re dopamine runners. The brain’s pleasure drug. Our reward for prediction…for following the melody of a song, the patterns of a mini-boss, the shape of a cloud. Each drip makes the event, gives it potency. Contrary to popular belief, this trade of ours—what some call art—isn’t a manufacturing role…that’s the brain’s job. No, our task is to convey…to communicate, to deliver narrative from one place to another place. All to stimulate the drip. We traffic in dopamine. And the brain’s always in the market. In this way the world is not unlike those old 8-bit games where the landscape is littered with gold coins. The coins don’t really mean much, but we collect them anyway. Why? Cuz it feels good to go after them. Cuz it gives the distance between destinations purpose. That world is our world—roaming from place to place, collecting drips. Just cuz. Cuz that gives us purpose.

     “Our world is all coins and no castles.”

On the surface, Raymond Carver vs. the Mortality of Man—Jeffrey Auburn’s 2007 game—is a fairly uncomplicated affair. “I was wrestling with this idea of narrative in art, how both the author and reader are joined in this act of creation…equals in my mind, just one having come before the other. I thought, why not explore that…? So I yanked four stories from Carver’s catalog, ‘Why Don’t You Dance?’ ‘Neighbors,’ ‘Cathedral,’ and ‘A Small Good Thing’; I dug up sprite sheets from Earthbound, a fitting reference, I thought, for a game that attempts to bring art back down to earth; and I got to work.”

     “My first goal I guess was to create a balance between what I call the author-author and the player-author. So I divided each story into scenes, four in most cases, “A Small Good Thing” being the notable exception. I timed these scenes based on average reading speed, four hundred words per minute, to further bridge the gap between playing and reading. Carver’s stuff is pretty short so you’re looking at no more than two minutes a scene usually. Then I populated the world with characters from each of Carver’s stories, gave them basic patterns to follow…programmed them to interact with items and characters should they run into them. Kinda like a domesticated version of Pac-Man‘s ghosts—roaming from kitchen to bedroom; from bedroom to bathroom; from standing close to standing far away. This was my foundation: a world of characters without drama, without constraints, living happy, quiet, peaceful, domestic lives. Oh but that didn’t seem fun enough…”

     “So I brought Raymond Carver into the mix. Literally. He’s our chain-smoking Pac-Man, loosed upon the peace and quiet of the suburbs. Then I gave him two abilities: the first, the ability to physically alter space, to push items around. To just make a mess of the world; or tidy it up, of course, should the mood strike. Then I added descriptions of the interactions at the bottom. Seemed fitting. The characters, should they come in contact with anything you push around, will interact with the items in some way, usually change direction. I thought this would be one way that the player could work creatively with the time constraint…by pushing items into the way of characters as you rush to do something else, to send that character to the next spot you’d like them. I decided to make Carver’s second ability less subtle—using his Cigarette Mind-Link, Raymond Carver is able to take control of characters, to put them directly into position (until they wander off, that is); to force them to interact with an object or character. It was all very simple in concept…not unlike a short, timer-based version of The Sims. So I twisted the knot tighter…”

     “I added scoring, awarded after every scene, based on numerous factors—the proximity of characters to one another, the arrangement of items, the times and order that events occur…all added up into a final score at the end of the game, and (here’s the kicker) all pitted against the high score record holder: Raymond Carver. It quickly became clear to me what kind of game I had on my hands…a game about interpretation…either the loose, personal interpretation of space, items, and characters, foregoing any concern for the high score screen…or a terse, calculated battle between Raymond Carver’s interpretation and the player’s own.”

     “In arcades, the difference in scores is taken to mean the difference in ability. I wanted Raymond Carver vs. the Mortality of Man to be about deviation from The Narrative…from the nebulous ‘fact’ of Raymond Carver’s interpretation of the world. Giving the playthroughs a score, I thought this might reenforce the notion that ‘fact’ can be contested, grappled with. Thus the game becomes a race for re-creation. Of taking common parts of the world and conveying an experience with them. What I like to think that I achieved here is a fusion of two previously separate processes—the narrative and the arcade. Both find themselves intertwined here. I call the result Narrative Arcade; Narcade if you’re feeling cutesy.”

     “You see, it’s like this: a good narrative is the player’s fault…it’s the work of his brain, searching for patterns and causation, for links and parallels…What we call ‘the author’ is just the first player, the record holder. So I created a game that pits players against that concept they call ‘author’…The stories—so much as they ‘make sense’ in Carver’s interpretations—can make any sort of sense the player sees in them, too. But instead of just giving the player a space, I gave them a challenge: ‘So you wanna be an author, huh? Well let’s see if you can beat Raymond Carver.”

Weeks since then. I wake up with an impulse, a notion. I call Jeffrey, looking for answers. The fact that it’s seven in the morning barely registers. “Yeah?” he says. On the other end of the phone, the hot silence of a room disturbed.

     “Raymond Carver vs. the Mortality of Man.”

     “Alright. What about it?”

     “Can the high score be beat?”

     “You mean, can the player out-interpret Raymond Carver? I don’t know. It’s possible, I guess. I try to keep my programming sloppy like that. Lets the art seep out.”

     The hasty scratch of my pen. “So you’re saying yes, it definitely can be done?”

     “I’m not saying that.”

     “What are you saying then?”

     “I don’t know…” he mulls it over, “that it’s inevitable, I guess.”

Next Month: ULYSSES: THE VIDEOGAME

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