My novel, two video games, and Roy Batty.

[samanthaunwise]

I’ve been writing a novel.

 Haphazardly, of course. One of the advantages of having plenty of time on my hands while I’m ekeing my way back into regular employment is that I can actually indulge the middle-of-the-afternoon jolts of imagination and sit down and knock out a page, rather than try to retain the thought until the evening and inevitably lose it.

It is very unlikely that anything I write will see the light of day. Rather than be tiresome and say this is because it’s simply awful (while I do think this is the case, this would be fishing), I do not have the inclination to commit myself to saying that I am writing for publication. I’m writing it for me alone. If I finish it, fantastic. At the moment it is something I amuse myself with every couple of days for one or two hours at a time. I will likely live and die without it ever getting shown to anybody. A shared secret between me and my hard drive.

Now that I’ve told you that, I want to tell you about something else.

I play a lot of video games. They are the main form of media I consume, by a very large margin. Every now and again, somebody pops up and talks about how not enough people are working towards preserving old games, and a lot of older games are being lost to time. However, while there are a few concerted preserving efforts, these voices appear (to me) to be rare.

In a sense, this isn’t much unlike books I suppose. While books seem easier to preserve because they are physical, there must be countless cheaply-produced novels that went out of print and were forgotten.

To say nothing of ones that are sitting in manuscript form, never read by anybody but the author.

I’m less interested here in the preservation of games for their cultural impact. That needs to be done, of course, but what I’m talking about here is of a little more of a philosophical bent.

There have been many games that have really sat with me. That have caused often-devastating emotional reactions and that I have needed to talk to other people about after playing. For many games, this is easy. If it was a popular game, I can probably find somebody to talk to it about. I’m not talking about that kind of game.

I’m going to talk about two games. I’ll get to my point eventually.

Now, this part may embarrass me if I had the capacity to feel shame about things I enjoy.

Game 1 – Space Station 13

Between the years 2009 and 2015, I became addicted to a game called Space Station 13. This came and went in waves, but at its worst moments (while I was at university) I was playing the game for all of my waking hours without stopping to eat properly or take care of my living space. Now, this game is not especially obscure. It’s hardly mainstream, but checking as I write this, Space Station 13 has 566 active players on now across many servers (not including private servers).That’s pretty good for an incredibly clunky game on a very poor engine.

When I was playing that game, it was on “high RP” servers. I played, almost exclusively, “Natalie O’Connor”. This is a name I have occasionally used in larps since then. I’m not going to give you her character biography, but I told a huge amount of stories with her. I suppose that’s inevitable, given I was playing her for upwards of 12 hours a day at times in a consistent environment. I could tell you her entire career path, and the major events in her life.

Even writing that now, my heart aches a little bit. Part of me is dying to tell you all about her. To keep her alive.

Who remembers those stories? I interacted with some people who were incredibly writers, and together we produced brilliant stories. A couple of those people are connected with me on Facebook, and might be reading this now – Hello, if you are. You are still important to me.

She was alive. When I stopped playing – when I had to stop playing because, I say again, I was addicted – she died. I have, once or twice, logged back on to certain servers as her since then. It’s not the same. I don’t recognise the characters. Worse, occasionally I did recognise somebody. Either way, I always ended up crying. Out of loss.

The stories were transient, forgotten, and lost.

Game 2

I told you I was going to embarrass myself.

This game, again, is “slightly obscure but not really”. It was created as a no-combat RPG dating game by somebody on 4chan no wait come back keep reading!

Look, ok. I’m writing about things that were important to me. Sometimes those things aren’t without problems. Me liking something isn’t me saying it’s without problems or that I don’t care about those problems. Or that I think the item is good quality.

As with my novel, I’m writing for me.

With that out of the way, the second game is Embric of Wulfhammer’s Castle. It’s a game in which you are a Duchess sent to marry a male adventurer, he’s nowhere to be found, time to flirt with all of the ladies in the castle.

So far, so “RPG made by a man about lesbians”. But it’s actually good! It’s actually…incredibly, just incredibly well-written at times. It has about 25 endings (you need a guide to work out in what order to get them to not lock out others), an (in my view) hugely melancholy final-secret ending, and fully scored throughout, and – look, yes I know it’s a stupid yuri game that came out of 4chan! Yes, I know! Wait!

Ok, stop. I’m overegging the pudding on the apologies, and I’m doing so deliberately to make a point.

This game, when I first played it in 2012 or so, had such a huge emotional effect on me that I was eager to tell other people, but didn’t feel like I could. Even when I tried to I couldn’t explain how this was anything other than a standard RPG Maker RPG, but with some immature male-gaze lesbianism through in.

When I next became obsessed with it in 2014, I remember trying hard to explain to a friend of mine on a bus in Brighton when this game was brilliant, and again completely failing.

I couldn’t explain it. I still can’t, not really. I can say “look, it’s very self-aware!” or “the characters all have incredibly distinct voices!” or “look I just like seeing happy non-straight women in my stories” but none of these captured…why. Because nobody else had experienced it, or was going to experience it. The only place that experience existed was inside of my head.

I think I just love how much love has clearly gone into the story. And because, actually, it’s not actually very pornographic at all, when it comes to it. (not that there is anything wrong with porn – I also got a very similar reaction about Christine Love’s Ladykiller in a Bind, but that was mainstream enough that I didn’t feel the same isolation recommending it) Walking through the developer’s room at the penultimate-ending and reading words in his voice about why certain characters are as they are made me tearful. I feel like what might have started as a “heh I’m going to make a yuri game”, ended up with something that had a lot of care put into it.

That’s still not it, though. That’s a rationalisation. That’s me trying to explain to you why this ridiculous thing actually ended up being important to me, which I don’t understand myself and as I’ve said, can’t adequately commit to text anyway.

Saint Bomber, the guy who created Embric, has a patreon now. He’s making about RPG. He had 12 patrons when I checked. When I saw this, it made me incredibly sad. I’m patron number 13, now. I mostly did so, so that I could get on the discord and check he was actually still active. He is.

This entire post is mostly because about a week ago, I remembered the game. I instantly fell into a heaving, tearful panic. The official website went down years ago. What if it was no longer accessible? What if the experience now only existed fading in my memory? I felt dread, fear, that same feeling of loss when I think about the lost life of Natalie O’Connor.

What if it had been forgotten?

It hadn’t. The first page of google had a mirror with a link to the download. The google doc with the full guide for the game still existed. I downloaded a copy of both, keeping them safe. I immediately fell into another week-long obsession, trying to get all of the endings, and was again struck by the beauty in the game that I felt I couldn’t communicate to anybody else.

One day I will spill something on this laptop and destroy it, probably. What then?

 

Roy Batty was right

I was originally going to write about 3 games, with the third being “every cheap or free game I played during the 00s, that I have forgotten the name of”. But my point has been made by the two above. My point is not “we should do something to preserve these things”, because what I’m talking about preserving are the qualia, not the objects. There is nothing that and do that.

There is nothing that can ensure that other people are as affected by Embric, a ridiculous RPG made by somebody from 4chan, as I was. There is nothing that can make me remember every story told at every larp I’ve been to.

There is nothing that can bring Natalie O’Connor back to life.

What is evoked in me when I consider the vastness of the stories that have been created and then forgotten, or never shown the light of day, is not wonder but dread. Deep, overwhelming dread that there is some beauty that has been developed, nurtured and committed to a page and then flickered out of existence. Never to be reproduced in that precise fashion again.

My novel will never see the light of day. What will happen to those characters?