JON INGOLD
Write it like you stole it
So I played a game today – a charming indie affair with lush character designs and gorgeous animation. Characters were going through dramas and tight situations articulated in a low-key style, but it was always OK because every time something difficult was raised, the other characters were just really, really nice about it. Everyone was understanding and, honestly? Pretty cool. Certain individuals were confused, yes, but their social group never piled on the pressure. It was a supportive, warm and wholesome environment. I hated it. can understand the desire to create games like this – ‘cosy narratives’, if you will: our real world can be a bleak place full of undeserved suffering and intractable problems. We’ve seen in the past decade how callous the powerful are, and how much fawning their callousness generates. The systems that are meant to keep us safe seem to fail more than they succeed. For young people, the economic outlook in the short term seems as dark as the environmental one is in the medium. We don’t need fiction to show us the worst of humanity because he keeps standing for re-election. Why wouldn’t you want to retreat to a world where the baddies give up quickly, or maybe don’t even exist at all?
After all, the job of a writer – for a videogame or a TV show – was never to brutalise their audience, GRRM be damned. But the job of a writer isn’t to provide opiates, either. In his Creative Writing 101, science-fiction author Kurt Vonnegurt advises writers to be sadists, torturing their characters for dramatic purposes. But Vonnegurt was also joking almost all the time; his was a sardonic wit and his characters were always decidedly unreal people purpose-built to satirise and caricature. The only people Vonnegurt delighted in skewering were the non-fictional yet unbelievable politicians and religious zealots he saw around him in real life.
Why wouldn’t you want to retreat to a world where the baddies give up quickly, or maybe don’t even exist at all?
Meanwhile, the ‘cosy narratives’ of a hundred years ago were penned by, say, PG Wodehouse, in whose books overbearing aunts make unhinged and inescapable demands, and by Agatha Christie, who crews up each time with cheats and liars so she can murder two or three. The common theme? Christie’s stories are cosy not because they are safe but because the people in them who are placed in danger are rich. Like Vonnegurt, the reader’s comfort comes from the oppression of their oppressors.
In both cases, the comfort comes from the knowledge that the powerful, too, can be unhappy. There is simple pleasure in the punching of Nazis. (Case in point: even while indie studios are being annihilated by the death of Twitter,
