A Comfortable Hell

2018·4.3 MB·English

by  Stéphane F.

A comfortable hell
I am beta-testing the game of an artist called Lucila Mayol, that I discovered on a Facebook group
dedicated to the F.I.
The game is called No Sign Should Remain Inert, and it seems quite close to my own obsessions –
and despite its bugs and its flaws, there is something in the exploration of the house that the game
proposes, that is strangely catchy and intriguing.
It feels like you're going through someone else's memories. A childhood home plunged in the half-
light – perhaps the light of the memory that is lacking – where one wanders without knowing why,
and whose rare objects, the rare elements of scenery are charged with a mysterious sadness – the
sadness of the coming revelation maybe. We are visited by vague memories, voices and snippets of
past conversations about banalities that reinforce this bitter-sweet impression of summer reverie
(the dark house overlooks a garden flooded with light, where one seeks out) and tomb.
Dark places
I have many childhood memories of this kind. Real memories or memories of dreams – including a
recurring one which still makes me feel uncomfortable thirty years later. I wake up in my parents'
apartment, obviously alone. It is very dark but I do not know if it is day or night. I move as best I
can, in my room then in the hallway, then enter the kitchen. When I actuate the switch, nothing
happens. The light is out. And I understand in this dream, even as I'm a child, that this is not a
simple power outage. Something in the whole universe, in reality itself, has changed. In a variant of
the same dream, the switch works, but the bulb emits only a very weak, yellowish light, and I
understand again that it is not a simple technical problem – the light itself, the Light with a big L, is
somehow dying.
*
I started this article last Sunday evening, alone in the house of my parents (they were gone on
vacation). I bought a pizza in the restaurant that faces the railways and ate it while listening to
Current 93, very loud in the deserted house, all alone too. Then I went for a walk alone in the streets
as the storm began to rumble. I went up alone after dark, and went to bed with the Simpsons.
It was very relaxing and a little exciting to be absolutely alone at my parents' place. Half-heir, half-
burglar.
The next day I was a bit idle before the Holy Mass, so I took a walk in the streets. They were
absolutely nobody outside. The weather was cold and gray, I could see traces of a night storm; it
was probably but not enough to wake me up; maybe I was in a coma. There were no footsteps, no
car engines, no human voices, but the birds (and some frogs behind a house) were deafening; it felt
like being in the jungle. It sounded like they were telling each other the storm of the night before,
and maybe some secrets about an impending end of the world. All that seemed a very good start for
a story. But about what ?
*
One night alone at my parents is something that had not happened in years and years – since I left
home, actually. I used, as a teenager and then a young adult, during my two years of unemployment
after graduation, to stay up late, almost all night, and the family house then became my little private
kingdom. I wandered from one room to another, smoked cigarettes, dumped beer packs, took
endless baths listening to the silence and the sounds of the house, that I was going to call "organic".
The clock. Distant water flowing in pipes. Squeakings.
It was both a pleasant and anguishing feeling; there was something like the feeling of not really
being "at home", but – again – in its dark double, both threatening and totally familiar, familiar
precisely in what was threatening, and vice versa, like the revelation of something that daily life,
agitation, voices, would cover the rest of the time.
No need to go to Silent Hill, to Crouch End, or to call Lovecraftian monsters, gore or degenerate
villagers, to enter the dark double of the world – daily life and the objects and places that surround
us carry their own load of strangeness and threat. It just takes to turn down the sound a little.
I wrote some words about it.
"He often dreamed that he was alone in the house in the dark, barely lit by the street lights filtering
through the shutters. He dreamed of himself smoking a cigarette in front of the building, staring at
it to the point of discomfort, to the point of feeling radical strangeness, like when you repeat a word
so much that it loses all meaning and familiarity. He was obsessed with sewers and the distant
sound of water, very far away, very low, by the bathroom with its pipes whose noises inspired a
vague unease. The sound of water flowing through invisible pipes, into walls, and plunging far into
the ground."
It is in this same set of small texts that figure what would become my game The Storm:
"A man leaves his house on a stormy night, after hearing repeated screams in the night. He follows
the cries that seem as distant as ever as he goes along. What does he eventually find? Himself,
naked and curled up, terrified. The house is just an uninhabited ruin. "
The game – which was not really finished at the time of its release for the French Comp – is now
corrected, overall, and I'm currently translating it into English. It should take a few weeks, then I
will need English-language beta testers / writers who can, preferably, understand the original text. I
have two or three candidates in mind.
*
Afterwards, I will be done with this (despite everything, little) game that is The Storm – but not with
the theme of houses and haunting, whether it is the haunted houses, or the houses that haunt. This
theme has always... haunted me and the parser seems to me the best interface for games dealing
with that theme.
A game with rich relationships to build with NPCs, a game with behavioural, moral, strategic
choices, etc... does not need a parser essentially dedicated to object manipulation. But here,
precisely, to explore, examine, search, use, steal, do everything and anything, in a house lived as a
playground - whether the game is serious and even deadly serious, or not - and in a house which,
with what it contains, is the very object of the game (stories are about people, not things - but not
always) - this requires a parser.
Perhaps, if we consider all the things that life and human relations have to offer in terms of
complexity, irrationality and elusiveness, the parser gamers are a kind of refuge, a relaxing and
reassuring illusion of control, of logic. One could quite imagine an I.F. with hypertext links, such as
the CYOA, filled with abstract, behavioural, moral, relational, very complicated and painful
choices, where we would play a guy who between two episodes of this kind, would play parser
games, for this feeling of control, for a world decomposable into objects with predictable reactions
– and the game would really move from a hypertext link mode to a classic parser mode. Technically,
with Inform 7, this is not a problem.
*
I have been working, for a few months now, on another I.F. to be published, which I have entitled
The Visit, where we explore an unknown house, much larger and more detailed than the one in The
Storm. That's the opportunity to further refine what I started with The Storm in terms of simplifying
the parser, or rather bringing the parser closer to everyday language – or what a non-specialist in the
I.F. is most likely to type as commands.
I want to be able to type "Go to the bathroom" instead of "Go out, East, South, Come in", "Dress"
instead of "Put on pants, put on shirt, put on sweater", I want to type "Turn on the light", "Take a
bath", "Make dinner". I want all daily uses of the verbs DO and TAKE to be understood by the
program – including teleporting the character-player into the kitchen if the player types "Prepare a
meal" while in the bathroom. It only requires creating a few types of rooms, and very simple rules,
and it makes the game experience more natural. All this, without removing the possibility of typing
more classical, more analytical commands.
There will be, in The Visit, richer actions, a little more investigation and, in a way, several possible
ends, depending on the behaviour of the character-player – who will not be completely alone in the
house; I'm not saying more for now. Basically, however, whatever the narrative pretext is, the goal
is always the same: to wander in a foreign house, like in a closed universe to appropriate, in which
to realize all your voyeur and burglar fantasies.
*
I walk a lot these days – my pedometer tells me that I have done a little over two hundred
kilometres since the beginning of May. I do not hike in the countryside or on forest paths, because I
am losing more and more the taste for nature; I just wander almost every night in the residential
neighbourhoods that border my city. I taste the silence that reigns there, and this civility, this peace
of the petty bourgeoisie that only morons, thirsting for blood disguised as humanists, can despise.
I look at the houses, sighing with envy towards those who live there, and wondering endlessly
(when it would be enough for me to check my bank account and my life choices) why I didn't get
that; that delicious regressive and ancestral home sweet home feeling .
I imagine a monster yet to be named, who would break into people's homes; a vampire who would
not be thirsty for blood, but for belonging to a place and possessing a place, for belonging to a
family and to the world, but inevitably sent back into "outside, into the darkness" (Matthew 25:30).
*
I write this as I think back to James Ellroy, writing about his youth as an alcoholic, a vagrant and a
burglar in My Dark Places.
"Fritz maintained a little room adjoining his garage. He kept his records and his stereo shit there. It
was his hideout. He never let his parents or sister in. Lloyd, Daryl and I had keys. The room was 20
yards from the main house. The house tantalized me. It was my favorite sex-fantasy bacdrop. I
broke in one night. It was late '66.
Fritz and his family were out somewhere. I got down on the ground beside the kitchen door and
stuck my left arm through a pet-access hole. I tripped the inside latch and let myself in to the house.
I walked around. I kept the lights off and prowled upstairs and down. I checked the medecine
cabinets for dope and filched a few painkillers. I poured myself a double scotch and popped the
pills right there. I washed the glass I used and put it back where I found it.
I walked through Heidi's bedroom. I savored the smell of her pillows and went through her closet
and drawers. I buried my face in a stack of lingerie and stole a pair of white panties. I left the
house quietly. I didn't want to blow a shot at re-entry. I knew I'd touched another secret world.
Kay lived directly across the street. I broke into her house a few nights later. I called the house from
Fritz's back room and got no answer. I walked over and checked entry points. I found an open
window overlooking the driveway. It was covered by a screen secured with bent nails. I pried two
bottom nails loose, removed the screen and vaulted into the house.
It was strange turf. I turned a few lights on for a second to acclimate myself. There was no liquor
cabinet. There was no good shit in the medicine chests. I hit the refrigerator and stuffed myself with
cold cuts and fruit. I explored the house upstairs and down - and saved Kay's bedroom for last.
I looked though her school papers and stretched out on her bed. I examined a clothes hamper
stuffed with blouses and skirts. I opened dresser drawers and held a table lamp over them for light.
I stole a matching bra and panties. I replaced the window screen and bent the nails back to hold it
in place. I walked home very high.
Burglary was voyeurism multiplied a thousand times."
*
I think that a reconstruction, which I will never do, as an interactive fiction, of James Ellroy's youth
burglaries, would be a fucking great idea.
*
I understand only too well this need for transgression and voyeurism in Ellroy, because his own
marginality sends me back to mine, less extreme, more banal, but I feel it intensely, and sometimes I
smell it too on other men of my generation; a secret and shameful marginality, that you don't fully
explain yourself, and that you don't even really know what it is; but it's there, almost
indistinguishable in everyday life when you were born into a more or less normal family, with a
normal IQ, a more or less normal face, and a more or less normal ability to pretend and play the
social game. Something, one day, totally screwed up, and you got off the rails whether you like it or
not.
Paradoxically, this marginality leads Ellroy to an unbridled conservatism, undoubtedly caricatural,
which is understandable if we consider the interstellar space between his life, which he knows to be
out of control, and the images of a normal, healthy life, which he would like to join without
succeeding – and when he touches it, it is for dirtying it, like panties stolen during a night
expedition. This young Ellroy probably didn't know yet that his only possible destiny was fiction.
"The Establishment? Fuck that. Counterculture rage denotes a new conformity. Every puerile street
punk hates the Establishment. Their critique is short on analytical rigor and long personnal pique.
Street punk Ellroy knows this. He can't quite voice it epigrammatically. He's a neoconservative
crashing in parks and Goodwill bins [...] He created his own shit. The Establishment did not fuck
him. He made his own choices. He plumbed his own course. He engaged his own shit. Weird shit.
Gooooood shit. Painful shit compounding at a horrible cost. Righteous shit for future pages."
*
This idea that only fiction could make up for certain failures, fill certain gaps, certain absences,
repair irreparable things, and that only fiction could allow me to integrate or reintegrate places,
people, into my existence, struck me a few years ago, when music stopped being my main activity,
that I left for a very small city, with no artistic, professional, personal and mental future.
It took me two years to experience a huge and unexpected relief by understanding – and accepting
the fact – that it was no longer necessary to worry about what I was going to become and do with
my life, because fiction, the pure and simple refuge in fiction, the pleasure and consolation of
inventing other people's lives, would be my way out. It was around 2007-2008.
*
It started with hoaxes. I invented a fake music label, much more interesting than anything I could
really do. I created about forty fake Gmail addresses, and a number of Facebook accounts,
Wikipedia accounts, and I staged alone intense polemics that some real Internet users took seriously.
All this amused me innocently, but then I had a fantasy of fiction contaminating reality, of
"terrorism through fiction" which was also part of a little game, between my friend David and me. I
have put up posters in my city's streets with slogans from the writer Antoine Volodine / Maria
Soudaïeva, with the "red" imagery that accompanies them. I wrote fake university articles on an
acousmatic music composer (serial killer and rapist of young men, in his spare time), signed with
the name of my Master's degree director. Post-situationnist theoretical texts, half-serious, half-
fucked-up, with proclamations such as "In the future wars of liberation, to the constant rewriting of
history to which power is committed for the domination of souls and the world, we must oppose not
the search for and secret transmission of any historical truth, the "truth" having now become
inaccessible to us, and in any case useless, inoperative, because the true has definitely become a
moment of falsehood, but other rewritings – the struggle now being on the sole front of fiction and
manipulation, of dreams, of spectacle, of myth".
All this was mostly a joke. I believe that the first rather ambitious, and above all sincere, important
"work" for me, which I worked on at the time, deals with my good old hometown – which had
already served me as a basic material, as a young schoolboy, for a rather crazy and naive pen and
paper RPG, which I have already mentioned here. Everything started, this time, from a memory of
Christmas 2001: I had unexpectedly spent the afternoon of the 24th in a bar called L'Affiche,
accompanied by guys I used to hang out with when I was in high school, and with whom I had
founded a rock band, of which there is unfortunately no trace. I hadn't seen them since high school,
and over the afternoon, as we played I board games while drinking uncountable beers, more and
more well-known faces had entered the bar, people I didn't think I would see again before my death,
people I had sometimes entirely forgotten, but that the fact of seeing again moved me a lot. The
snow was starting to fall outside, and this whole afternoon seemed like a timeless, magical moment,
the kind of time that only comes in books – or at the end of time.
I started writing memories mixed with fiction, fake ads, fake diary entries, fake press articles, on a
blog.
I did not publish these things under my name, but under the slightly modified names of classmates
or people I met in the past. I later realized, seeing some of them again, that we actually had little
more to say to each other, that they had really, definitely come out of my life whether I like it or not,
and that the only way to bring things back to life was through fiction.
C'est encore le cas aujourd'hui avec l'I.F, au fond, qui me sert à faire vivoter, dans des mondes
minuscules, des gens que j'aime ou ai aimé, que parfois même je côtoie encore, mais avec qui ma
relation est fondamentalement morte – à l'instar de « Paloma » dans L'Observatoire, et de tant
d'autres PNJ dans Azthath ou dans les autres I.F qui m'occupent jour et nuit.
*
This is still the case today with the I.F., basically, which I use to bring to life, in tiny worlds, people
I love or have loved, that sometimes I even still know, but with whom my relationship is
fundamentally dead - like "Paloma" in The Observatory, and so many other NPCs in Azthath or in
the other I.F. that occupy me day and night.
*
Of course, we always relapse; we imagine that we still have things to do, that there are places to
take or something out there that awaits us. This is obviously not true. It struck me again, painfully, a
few months ago, when I had started a kind of photographic quest in the countryside and villages
around my home.
I had made myself a kind of exploration diary, almost a quest diary, where I planned to visit this or
that place, and once there, noted observations of all kinds. I fantasized about some abandoned
buildings that I had seen for years, from the road, away in the fields or in the forest, and I wanted to
stop there once and for all to immortalize them and see how much these places could bring me
something – for example, I vaguely played with the idea of joining the nearest shooting club, lost in
the woods, imagining myself getting to know the local rednecks and deepening my experience, my
geographical and social exploration of the area where I live, by this way.
It was when I found myself one afternoon, dying from heat, all alone, on the grounds of a dog
training club that fascinated me from the road, and where obviously nothing and no one was waiting
for me, nothing that I could integrate into my real life (except buying a Doberman and training him
to make saltos), that I wondered what the hell I was doing there, and what the hell I was doing in
general.
Including this place, and many others like it, in a fiction or an I.F or at worst, simply mentioning it
in my diary, which is a fiction like any other after all, is the only way I can do something with it.
*
Degenerate little towns
Attacking what is considered a monument of interactive fiction has something vaguely
embarrassing; what could we write that is new and worth publishing? It's not (only) me who says it,
but Emily Short:
"Writing a review of a very well-known and generally loved game is a tricky, not to mention
somewhat egotistical proposition."
The difference here is that she loved Anchorhead – and if she loved it, and considering thath I'm not
much compared to her, I will certainly not shoot it down, and I don't want to. But finally, I have to
admit that I didn't really manage to get in, hang on to it and understand what the program expected
from me. It's a game I was looking forward to playing, and even now I would like to like it. But the
fact is, if I admire the writing and the little world Michael Gentry built, I didn't like the game they
serve.
So I abandoned Anchorhead. I'm still finishing the 1998 version with a walkthrough in front of my
eyes, but that's not what I call playing, any more than watching a pedagogical film on reproduction
replaces the experience of love. At the risk of repeating myself, the problematic thing was the fact
that the player was left to himself from the beginning, without any solid intradiegetic reason to do
what he was doing – breaking into the real estate agency, checking which books Michael borrowed
once he was found in the library, searching his wallet the next day to consult them, giving a bottle
of liquor collected from a bar to a tramp, picking up a SERVIET and keeping it on until the next
day, and son on... The only reason (as a player) we could have to do all this, in my opinion, would
be to have already played the game for a long time, and to start a new game by trying to do
everything right, in the right order, which would violate one of the principles stated by Graham
Nelson in The Craft of Adventure:
"To be able to win without experience of past lives"
Emily Short thinks exactly the opposite ("Most of the actions one has to take are information-
gathering steps, and they proceed intuitively from what has gone before, require exploration of a
kind that fits the plot and the character of the PC, and dole out the relevant information at a nice
pace. One piece of the chain naturally suggested to me where I should go to look for the next piece
of information, so I rarely felt lost") and I am not pretentious enough to say that it is wrong; also, all
this must be a matter of mental wiring. I don't have the right mind for puzzles, no matter how
simple they may be. And I perceived Anchorhead as a big puzzle disguised as a story more than a
story that uses puzzles to move the player forward, but I'll admit that it's more about me than the
game. I could have probably, after ten or twenty years, by trying all the possible combinations, all
the actions in all the possible orders, finished the game without ever having felt this natural
progression in the story that Short appreciated. What's the point?
As a counter-example I would take the Robb Sherwin games, which I have played in recent weeks –
more precisely, Necrotic Drift and Cryptozookeeper. They start in medias res even faster than
Anchorhead, I recognize it, but the action (killing zombies in a shopping mall, organizing mutant
fights in the back room of a bar) requires less slow rise in tension – and especially, apart from that,
Sherwin can spare moments in his games: in Necrotic Drift, after the first scene in the video rental
store, you go home with your gang of friends and there's not much else to do but chat to them, and
with your girlfriend, while waiting for the action to take place. Just as you spend some time at
home, in Cryptozookeeper, after escaping from the alien prison where you meet your companions.
Robb Sherwin's games make, as a bonus, an ultra-light use of puzzles, if not non-existent. We
always know more or less what we have to do, and where, and the pleasure of playing theses games
is not that of the challenge to be taken up, the game to be won, but that of the story to be followed,
by participating and embodying, by interpreting (in the sense of following a script) a character – in
a way, even if we know almost exactly what to do after each gesture, the mere fact of typing
commands to make the main character act is enough to turn the reading experience into a game.
And the more it goes, the more I believe that an interactive fiction doesn't need to be much more
than that.
What I maintain about Anchorhead is that the game lacks exposure, "useless" scenes and depiction
of everyday life, which would comfortably set up the places, characters and story. Things get
serious as soon as you arrive in Anchorhead, without even taking the time to unpack once you find
the house. I would have liked more banal scenes of this kind, dialogues with Michael, walks in the
city, days and nights that progressively pass and install discomfort and the need, for both the player
and the character, to start investigating.
*
I speak of unease, but in reality, as is it often the case in horror films or novels, the atmosphere has
something curiously comfortable, soothing in its very darkness. There is something attractive about
these decrepit, unhealthy settings, in the tranquility of this small, degenerate town – you want to sit
among the drunkards in the bar near the real estate agency, and stay with them in silence, or to
wander along the tracks that the tall grass gradually invades. To enjoy the entropy that invades
everything, and indeed, not to unpack, not because there is an urgent mission to accomplish, but to
renounce all normality.
It seems that Michael S. Gentry personal website is down now. I don't know if that's where I read an
article he wrote a few weeks ago for the release of Anchorhead (version 2018), but I remember his
last sentence, which struck me; it said in substance:
"Now I know, Anchorhead is my home, and I will never leave it."
It confirms my first intuition about this game, and my interest in it: behind the horrific machinery is
clearly perceptible the author's attraction to his fictional world, the voluptuousness he feels in
describing it, not in spite of himself, but because of what he has of horrific, repugnant, unhealthy.
For Michael Gentry, Anchorhead is the house full of tricks in which he locks himself up and decides
to live Des Esseintes, and when he exclaims at the sight of the spotted leaves of a caladium,
"Everything is syphilis", we must hear a nuance of secret voluptuousness, of happiness.