Write it like you stole it
Today I played a game set in a mysterious world, full of wonderful hints of a forgotten past that were never clarified. I remember vividly the first time I played a game that did this – it was Team Ico’s Shadow Of The Colossus, 20 years ago, and my friend and I rode around its empty landscapes on horseback assuring each other that, since they’d gone to all the trouble of building this vast space, it must have something to say.
It didn’t. It was just vibes, y’know; perhaps the legacy of cut content. And while I loved that experience, I found I couldn’t do it again – when ThatGameCompany’s Journey came along a few years later, I enjoyed the mechanical play but I didn’t buy the world at all. There was no lost civilisation, no buried storyline, nothing to be understood. It was all vibes to me: sound without music.
But that makes it seem like I want everything explained and detailed, and that’s not right either. Take, for example, the famous case of the murdered chauffeur in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep. It’s a side murder in a detective novel and yet it’s never solved, and Chandler admitted years later that he didn’t actually know whodunnit. Popular science-fiction writer Adrian Tchaikovsky recently remarked (on Bluesky, bitches!) that he felt this made that novel less elegant. It’s definitely weird for a detective story not to tick off every side dish on the menu. But then Chandler wasn’t writing detective stories at all: he was writing ethnographies via his detective, Philip Marlowe, the one true man in a city of lies. The murders Marlowe investigates are there to open new avenues, not to puzzle-gate the plot, and Chandler drives Marlowe like a PC with a HUD full of ‘!’ icons to turn over the stones of 1940s Los Angeles so that he can point at the bugs crawling underneath.
The Marlowe novels are messy, atmospheric, more than the sum of their parts, and a poke in the eye to the wrappedand-ribboned jigsaws of Agatha Christie and GK Chesterton that dot every ‘i’, cross every ‘t’ and, as a result, don’t bear much of a re-read. (To put it another way: a murder going unsolved in a real American city is totally believable seeing as you can’t solve crimes by running over protestors in a battle tank.)
There was no lost civilisation, no buried storyline, nothing to be understood. Journey was all vibes: sound without music
The true elegance to admire in Chandler’s work is not in his machinations but in his authenticity, and what he shows us is that to know a storyworld in your own mind is one thing, but to enter the perspective of a character within that world is quite another. I suspect Chandler had a sense of who might have killed the chauffeur, enough to detail the crime anyway, but it doesn’t
