If you didn’t know where my blog’s name comes from before, you’ll know now. I wrote an “extended critical essay” for Spalding’s MFA program about Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren. The novel’s opening lines are:

to wound the autumnal city.
So howled out for the world to give him a name.
The in-dark answered with wind.

Over the years, I’ve coerced a number of people to actually read the massive thing, and managed to find a few fans in the gaming community, so I figured I’d post the whole essay. It’s only 23 pages long, so “extended” is a bit of a misnomer.

The essay is obviously going to “spoil” some things, but Dhalgren, like all literature, really isn’t something that can be ruined by revealing plot points. It’s not a mystery with a neat answer at the end, and it may even be helpful to have a little bit of context before reading it for the first time. I’ve read the book four times and I’m still finding new things and making new connections.

Just looking over the essay and writing this post makes me want to start reading it again. For me, it’s that book I’ll read every year for the rest of my life. It’s had a huge impact on my life and the way I view the world.

The Autumnal City: Symptoms of Schizophrenia in Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren

I’m finally finished with my Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing degree, so I’m out of excuses for not  posting more. I plan on getting back to my revision series that I started back in June, but first I want to put some stuff up that I worked on during the program.

One of my graduation requirements was to deliver a thirty minute lecture during my final residency the week before last. I decided I wanted to introduce my interest in video games as a form of storytelling, but wasn’t sure how that would be received by the program. Luckily, once I explained my idea to the program administrators and the faculty member, Robin Lippincott, whose novel I intended to use in the lecture, everyone seemed interested.

The lecture went well, though I was quite anxious about giving one to an audience of my colleagues and faculty members instead of a group of rowdy high school students. I read straight from my lecture notes, so it probably wasn’t the most engaging experience, but I used a looped video of Passage playthroughs so everyone would have something to watch. I also passed around my iTouch to allow everyone a few moments to play the game.

I used Corvus Elrod’s definitions for the game terminology in the lecture. I’m sure there could be some discussion on how I explained game dynamics vs. mechanics, and my interpretation of the game itself, but everyone seemed to understand the explanation. There was a moment at the end of the lecture when I asked for questions that I was sure no one had any to ask because they were so thoroughly confused, but then the hands went up, and I ended up having to talk to many people after the lecture. Hopefully I didn’t lead them astray.

So without further ado, here is my lecture, including awkward pre-written jokes that mostly inspired laughter (though it may have been forced and sympathetic! The one involving pirates and ballet dancers was met with silence):

Graduation Lecture – Travis Megill

“The training of literary talent requires repetition of the experience of reading . . . it does not require repetition of the experience of writing (other than that required to achieve general literacy) in the same way that piano playing or drawing does.” – Samuel R. Delany, About Writing

My first packet is off to my mentor, so now is the perfect time to take a step back and explain this whole “Creative Thesis” thing. The thesis is one of the graduating requirements for my MFA degree. It can take on a variety of forms, but it must be at least 75 pages of publishable fiction (publishable meaning, I suppose, that no one would be horrified if they received it to be considered for publication, and not that it will be snapped up by literary magazines like dog treats). My thesis, if everything goes according to plan, will be around 120 pages, and that’s a pretty considerable “if.” Mostly it depends on which stories my mentor decides are polished enough to be included.

The ~120 pages contain ten short stories that I’ve worked on as a Spalding student. They were conceived as a story cycle, so the narratives are linked. The first story I wrote is the last story in the collection. It was written when I was an undergraduate, but the number of words that still exist from the first draft are evaporating quickly.

The cycle is loosely based on my family, and the overarching narrative follows a woman from childhood to death and a little bit beyond. The stories cover three generations of the family: the grandmother, two sons, and two grandsons.

The first story works as an introduction, and takes place a few months before the final story. Story II & III jump back to the grandmother’s childhood. S-IV transitions from one generation to the next and is narrated by one of the grandmother’s daughters. S-V and VI feature the grandmother’s sons during childhood and early adulthood. S-VII is about the relationship between the grandmother and one of her adult sons. S-VIII transitions to the next generation, narrated by one of the grandsons as a child. And finally, S-IX and X are told by the grandsons, one as children and the last as adults.

So what’s the story cycle about? I’ll boil that down into a list of themes or goals, the subjects I’m aiming to consistently present across the range of stories. It’s about generational influence, mental illness (directly and the fear/fascination that family members experience indirectly), undeserved guilt, relationships between brothers, emotional and physical distance between family members, and the mythology a younger generation creates to explain the older generation.

Yes, that’s all very vague, but it works as an overview of the structure and content. The stories are arranged chronologically except for the first, which takes place between S-IX and X. Who knows if I’ll keep this order, but it’s made me happy for a few months so that’s better than the previous iterations. Other factoids that are probably interesting only to me: 5 are told in first person (1 by the grandmother, 1 by each son, 2 by a grandson | 3 are retrospective), the rest are in third person (2 grandmother, 1 daughter, 2 grandson | 2 retrospective). Perspectives and narrative distance are the most likely elements to change, but it’s helpful to know where I stand at the moment.

Today I mailed out Stories I-IV. In July, V-VII, and for August, the remaining VIII-X. Since I and IV were brand new stories this time around, I’m planning on focusing directly on revision for the rest of the submissions. Hopefully I can look at each of the stories on a few different levels: the micro-level to examine words, sentences, and paragraphs, the story-level to look at structure within each story and higher level elements like character, setting, tension, theme, and then the macro-level as I continue to shape each story as part of the larger cycle.

My next post will describe the various revision techniques I’m using to analyze the stories at each of those levels. If I haven’t completely bored you by this point, come back and check that out. In the meantime, if any of this seems interesting, please visit The Creative Process and share your ideas, inspirations and practices with the rest of us.

Somehow, time has passed me by. I started the Master of Fine Arts brief-residency program at Spalding University in the Fall of 2007, but it seems ridiculous that a year and a half has passed already. Working full-time and filling the rest of the hours with a writing program is quite the time machine. I’ve had the opportunity to work with wonderful mentors and workshop leaders: Ellie Bryant, Joyce McDonald, Robin Lippincott, Kirby Gann, Rachel Harper, Jody Lisberger, Julie Brickman, and Crystal Wilkinson, as well as participate in a community of writers that have consistently inspired me to improve.

And now I’ve started my final semester.

Three projects form the bulk of the MFA program: the Creative Thesis (a story cycle, for me), the Graduation Lecture, and the extended critical essay, which I completed last semester. So the months before graduation will be spent rewriting, revising, and polishing the stories in my thesis and developing a lecture to give at my final residency in November. Fortunately, I’m excited about both the lecture and the thesis, and feel like they are ready to be pushed toward final, presentable products.

There is, however, a lot more that goes into that final push than I would have thought before I started the degree. Since I’ve been working on the stories that comprise the Creative Thesis for a year and a half, they’ve become so familiar to me that it’s difficult to see their flaws, and even the noticeable ones seem impossible to fix. Stories that seemed strong at the end of a first draft are flimsy when placed next to their brothers,  and the possibility of them all standing together seems laughable at the end of a long day. Pulling it all together is the hardest part.

So I’ve decided to write a little about this final leg of the program. Putting the process into words where I can see them helps make the whole thing less daunting, and hopefully it will be helpful to others as well, whether fellow MFA students or anyone else trying to complete a project that’s occupied their minds for so long it’s difficult to imagine letting it out.

I also hope that some of you will join me in cataloging your projects, writing or otherwise. The most exciting things I’ve learned as part of a community of artists have always arrived from a sharing of process. Just knowing that a multitude of paths exist that all lead to that final goal is encouraging. As more light is  shed on the ground in front of us, it becomes easier to pick and choose, and the creative process is strengthened.

If you’re interested please join the social network I’ve started at ning.com: The Creative Process. I’m hoping it can serve as a hub for individual blogs. It has a discussion board, a chat room, individual profiles, and a number of other features designed to make creating a community online easy (as long as I can figure them all out).

For anyone that’s just getting started on the whole blogging thing, you can either blog at The Creative Process page, or if you’d prefer to have your own separate space, I recommend WordPress.com. If you sign up for a free account, the site will lead you through the entire process and set up a blog just for you. Then you can connect your WordPress blog to The Creative Process and you’ll be ready to go. Let me know if you have any questions by leaving a comment below.

]]> http://theautumnalcity.com/general/the-final-stretch/feed/ 0 http://theautumnalcity.com/general/the-autumnal-city-has-been-hijacked/ http://theautumnalcity.com/general/the-autumnal-city-has-been-hijacked/#comments Thu, 11 Jun 2009 20:15:27 +0000 Travis Megill http://theautumnalcity.com/?p=586

Don’t worry, it’s not as serious as it sounds.

Over the past few months I’ve only been posting entries to Corvus’s Blogs of the Round Table, and I’ve noticed my game design ideas have begun to dovetail with my MFA Creative Thesis. Since I’ve just entered my final semester at Spalding University, and only have three months to whip my thesis into shape, I’ve decided to use this space to catalog and discuss my process.

I hope all of my current followers will find my creative process for writing interesting and informative since I believe it shares a lot with any other creative process. I’ve found that any differences in the act of creating across forms is usually an opportunity to examine my own methods and often offers a new perspective on my writing.

For those not interested in improving or comparing their own creative process, I’m interested to see if a peek into my development of an idea from first to “final” draft changes your perspective on creation or sheds any new light on how stuff comes together in the deranged mind of a writer.

To begin sharing my experience this semester, I’ve decided to write a series of introductory posts. The first will give an overview of the requirements in my last semester of graduate school, along with personal goals I’ve set for myself that extend past graduation. The second will describe my Creative Thesis and my intentions for it this semester. The last will explain the  graduate lecture I’m giving in November at the Spalding residency.

After the introduction, I’ll discuss my revision process as it grows and changes, since it is constantly revising itself. I’ll look at specific stories and explain why I made the changes I did, as well as how I discovered a change needed to be made. One of the goals of sharing all of this is to constantly refine my process, so feel free to let me know what’s working and not working, or what works and doesn’t work for your process.

Also, I’d love to be a part of an ongoing cross-form discussion about the creative process, so let me know in the comments if you have a blog pursuing similar interests in writing or any other creative outlet.

My game design idea for this month’s Round Table addresses mental illness, specifically schizophrenia, and the ways it dehumanizes the person suffering from it. I initially intended to deal with something that wasn’t as sensitive to me personally, and at first, I couldn’t identify anything that I both had insight into, and felt strongly about. Sometimes, however, the most troubling issues are so close that they are easy to overlook.

Mental illness is definitely a taboo subject in our culture, though many of us will experience some degree of it during our lives. People experiencing mental illness are often discriminated against, both blatantly and in countless other more subtle ways. People dealing with serious mental illness are often feared and isolated, even by their own families. A large portion of the homeless population suffers from undiagnosed or untreated mental illness. Unfortunately, because of the nature of many serious mental illnesses, the people experiencing the diseases are unable to even comprehend that they are sick.

Schizophrenia is particularly misunderstood in popular culture, where people experiencing the disease are often depicted as violent murderers, or are said to be “schizophrenic”, but are actually experiencing multiple personality disorder. The word “schizophrenic” itself is misused to describe things that have very little to do with the actual disease. I wanted to attempt a game design that humanizes someone with schizophrenia instead of trivializing the disease.

My family has a history of mental illness. Most of my family members, including myself, deal with depression and anxiety. My uncle was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia as a teenager. The fear of, and fascination with, serious mental illness is something I’ve dealt with for much of my life.

The short story collection I’m working on explores various facets of mental illness and the way it affects a family over three generations. It is based on my grandmother’s life, and her influence on two sets of brothers: my father and uncle, and my brother and me. I decided to use one of the stories as a model for my game design, to see if I could convey the meaning of the story through game mechanics instead of words.

The story describes a mother visiting her son at his apartment. The son suffers from schizophrenia, and the mother feels a lot of guilt for the way his life has turned out. She expresses that guilt through jealousy of the psychiatric workers that care for her son. She feels like their responsibility for her son represents her failure as a mother, so she tries to clean his apartment and projects her guilt onto others. My goal with the game design is to have the player explore the relationship between mother and son through gameplay, and to discover the characters, their relationship, and their conflict without revealing anything directly.

The game uses a single screen depicting a dark apartment living room and kitchen from an isometric perspective. The rooms are illuminated only by a small, fake Christmas tree with flashing lights and a television tuned to fuzz. The audio starts as television static, but faint Christmas music plays beneath, from a radio on the kitchen counter. A calendar on the wall lists the month as June. Only two characters, the mother and the son, are directly shown. Their interiority is represented by images that form over their heads. The mother’s image appears directly on the background without any discrete separation, as if part of the environment, but the edges of the son’s image are fractured.

The game starts with the mother entering the apartment and the son in the bathroom, which is not shown, but suggested by the strip of light beneath the door. The player can only interact by clicking the mouse on the environment. The cursor is a hand, but changes to signify objects the player can use on something else. The shifts in light and sound are the mother’s perception, not the son’s, and this is apparent to the player because their input only directly influences the mother.

The floor of the apartment is filthy, but a vacuum sits in its center, power cord tangled around its base. Cigarettes butts are piled on a pizza pan sitting on the kitchen table, and are spilling over onto the floor, but the trashcan by the refrigerator is emtpy. Dirty clothes are strewn across the living room, but a washer and dryer sit in a closet off the kitchen. Cleaning up any of the mess will bring the son out of the bathroom. The mother visualizes a tidy apartment with her and the son embracing, but the son visualizes his mother crying. The Christmas tree dims and the static’s volume increases as the mother continues to clean.

If the player selects the Christmas tree or the photo album on the coffee table, the object will enlarge and allow a choice between handmade family ornaments or photographs. The icon will change accordingly, and the image above the mother’s head will change to reflect the memory represented by the object. All of the memories will be subverted by the mother’s guilt, but if the player uses the object on the son, both of their memories will slowly merge. The Christmas lights will get brighter and the music on the radio will become louder. As the shared memory unfolds, the image will tarnish and the mother will refuse to select another memory until the apartment is cleaner.

As the mother cleans, the son’s image will darken and display memories associated with his illness, but as the mother and son share more memories, the player will gain the ability to directly interact with the image above the son, altering the negative memories by clicking their source and clearing away the darkness by swiping with the cursor. The fractured border will remain unchanged, as the player’s actions are not intended to represent alleviation of symptoms related to schizophrenia. As the player balances the mother and son’s mood, the Christmas tree will get progressively lighter and the Christmas music will replace the television’s static.

When the static is gone, the son will turn off the radio and pick up the guitar sitting in the corner. The mother and son sit on the couch together and the son plays her a song he wrote for her (this is conveyed through the now completely shared image above their heads). The song will incorporate elements from all of the memories, both good and bad, and the son’s portion of the image will retain its fractured edges, to show that the brain disease’s effect on the son has not been alleviated in any way.

The apartment is not fully cleaned, and the son’s song is not completely happy, but it is important that the mother has formed a connection with the son and is able to cope with her guilt directly through the memories they share. The mother is the only character that changes significantly, because the son is not at fault in the conflict. His willingness to share the song he has written for her is based on the connection she forms with the player’s input.

I hope my design managed to convey story through game mechanics. Developing a game that’s implicit rather than explicit in meaning is a little like walking a tightrope, especially when presenting a sensitive subject, since the intention can be misinterpreted. Even the visual representation of the mother and son’s thoughts could be offensive, considering the symptoms associated with schizophrenia. Hopefully, by making it obvious to the player that the visuals are an abstract gameplay mechanic that originates with the mother and not the son, the potential insensitivity is avoided. Please let me know in the comments, however, if anything in the game design seems to trivialize the situation I was trying to explore.

The poem is entitled, “Wii Death.”

http://bestpoem.wordpress.com/category/lafayette-wattles/

Through my research on Samuel R. Delany for my MFA research paper, I stumbled across his opinions on the development of a language of criticism for Science Fiction. I think it applies in interesting ways to the development of a gaming language as well.

“Frequently this correspondence point generates a term; frequently this term is appropriated from the literary field to the [Science Fiction] field . . . But what this finally produces in the SF critical field is an array of terms that discuss only similarities. The field of critical terminology, because it is appropriated, suggests that similarities are much more pervasive than they actually are.”

We’ll assume in gaming language that “correspondence point” equals blog post. Over at SLRC, Ben was commenting on the merits of developing terms for gaming criticism (or lack thereof), and though this article doesn’t directly respond to his thoughts, it does argue for a completely new language to be developed over lifting critical terms from other forms of art. By taking these terms from other places in an effort to elevate game criticism to the level of art criticism, we’re focusing on similarities instead of highlighting what makes video games unique.

I know Corvus Elrod, Iroquois Pliskin, Michael Abbott (check out the comments sections for another great article), and I’m sure many others, including academics in the expanding arena of video game programs, are already thinking about the language of video games, but it’s interesting to see how other fairly new artforms have struggled with their own terminology. [EDIT: another interesting post by Pliskin that popped up just as I published this]

Delany also talks about how genres should be defined by the strategies used for reading them instead of specific characteristics of the subject matter: “A more fruitful way to characterize the distinction between genres is to view it as a set of distinctions between reading protocols, between ways of reading, between ways of responding to sentences, between ways of making various sentences and various texts make sense.”

At first, I thought this was interesting because it seems that game genres are already based on this convention. The genres are set up based on gameplay mechanics, not subject matter, and a gamer knows they might like a game because they know the conventions of the genre (i.e. Its control scheme). Delany argues that sub-genres are the place to differentiate based on subject matter, which the gaming industry also does.

I wonder, though, whether Delany would think gaming genres are labelled wrong. Does “platformer” really distinguish how Braid should be understood as a game? It correctly labels a set of gameplay mechanics, but Delany’s “reading protocol” is based around “making various sentences and various texts make sense.” Is understanding how to play Braid enough to characterize it as a platformer? Or should its genre definition be based on how to “understand” Braid? I guess that depends on whether the genre definitions are set up to aid shoppers or to aid game critics with how to critique a game.

(The pictures in this post are intended to break up my wall of text and also to illustrate an aesthetic conflict between my intended meaning and your experience reading this post)

The MDA framework is used as a lens to view the process of creating games, but I’m also interested in using it to view examine the process of creating writing, specifically revision. Since this post will consider a shared framework between games and writing, I’m considering it on-topic. This idea was inspired by Corvus Elrod’s post, “Mechanics are to Grammar as Dynamics are to…”, which I recommend.

The MDA framework breaks down games into three components: mechanics, dynamics, and aesthetics. I think the framework probably relates more easily to the later stages of revision, when a writer is trying to fine-tune the mechanics of a story so that the aesthetics of the piece are supporting the meaning or experience that’s intended, but I want to look at some interesting parallels with the beginning of the revision process. In a previous post, I talked about revision and included a link to my work-in-progress “Revision Procedure”.

After a draft is completed, it’s important for a writer to figure out what the intended meaning of the story actually is. The initial idea for a story and it’s meaning after a first draft is completed are rarely the same. (You can see this distortion taking place in many of my blog posts, where the initial idea for the post is lost in whatever new tangent I’ve discovered. It happens on other blogs too, I’m watching!) What is the writer trying to convey to the reader? The second draft is important because it allows the writer to experiment with drastic changes to the story in order to make that meaning more apparent. The dynamics of the story will change, sometimes significantly, in order to focus the story on the fleshed-out idea the writer comes up with in the first draft.

The MDA has an example of its framework in use: a series of “passes” regarding a Babysitting game. The example shows how the mechanics of a game and its intended audience can completely change the way it plays. The aesthetic goals for each “pass” change the Babysitting game in a fundamental way. As I mentioned above, the MDA framework doesn’t directly relate to the early stages of revision, but I’m interested in these fundamental changes.

Once a writer has a precise written summary of what he or she wants to accomplish, they can experiment with changing the elements of the story in order to align the aesthetics with the meaning or goal. For example, in a story I’m working on now, about a mother and son relationship, I intitially chose a psychiatric hospital as the setting. The story is about the complex emotions, guilt, frustration, etc. that this mother feels toward her schizophrenic son. I realized while looking at the completed first draft that the setting conflicted with the goals I had for the story. If I’m examining the relationship between a mother and son, a better setting would be the son’s apartment, where I can reference their past organically through objects in the room. I wasn’t writing a story about the effects of a psychiatric hospital on a patient, or a mother’s distress over her son’s treatment.

The change in setting had a dramatic effect on the writing as well as my understanding of the characters and their relationship. Other elements of the story need to be examined as well, such as perspective (would the story work better in a 1st/third/omniscient POV? should it be told from the son’s perspective?), narrative distance (up close to focus on the mother’s experience, or backed further away to encompass both mother and son?), time period (how old is this conflict? how long has it been developing? is this the first time the mother/son have encountered these emotions?), etc.

The MDA framework’s example shows three games with a common theme, but each of them is different because of their mechanics and the dynamics that are created. To understand the revision process, a writer has to understand how the mechanics of writing work to create dynamics that lead to an aesthetic experience for the reader, from which they extract the meaning of the story (does this make any sense or am I just dropping MDA words into a sentence? .

The framework helps me, as a writer, to understand that every choice I make in a story has a direct consequence on the final aesthetic experience, and unless I’ve thought about how I’m creating the dynamics in my story in regards to my final intended meaning, then I failed and probably created unintentional conflict between my intended meaning and the reader’s experience of the story.

December ’08 Round Table Entry. Sorry for the pessimistic view on things.

(The Ghost of Gaming Future What role will gaming play in your familial relationships in 5 years? 10 years? 20 years? Having already explored both the past and the present, this month’s round table asks us to turn our eyes to our future gaming expectations. If you can’t picture how gaming will impact your own family, feel free to explore what game designers could/should/shouldn’t do to make gaming a more family friendly experience, or even to create and explore a fictional world where gaming is (or isn’t) a major part of every family’s life.)

I sit, crouched over my desk with my head in my hands. My point counter sits in the upper left of my screen, nestled in the shadow of my eyebrow. It slowly rolls up by one. The pity point only increases my frustration. Without a breakthrough, an inspiration beyond my ability, I’ll never gain the experience necessary to apply for college.

My mother’s voice replays, quietly, in my left ear. You need a job. Find some place else to live. What do you want to be? I don’t know why I recorded it, I’ll hear it live again at dinner.

I reset my overlay and switch to recreation. A colorful, hyper-real gild covers the drab fibers of my bedroom. The counter spins upward. Familial relationships, employment, and dream progress are just tabs that cluster around the blurry knob of my nose in the center of my vision. They’ll stay there, a subtle reminder of what I should be doing.

The wall of my bedroom dissolves, and as my body sits paralyzed in my chair, I walk out onto the fronds of a gigantic fern. Nodes of light bloom around me, zooming past, their intensity dependent on their accumulation of points. I trail my finger across one of the brightest and a head appears. From its neck an intricate array of tentacles sprout, each one a thread defining an aspect of the user’s experience. I grab the thickest and reach for another node.

I gather several threads and wrap them together, combining them. Each head seems to fight the concoction, their animations assigned by the user, but they eventually coalesce into one. The eyes show a preview of the playground I’ve created, video projected into the space where the light surface and dark of the pupil usually sit.

I’m pulled into the grinning head and enter a world created on the fly. The rules sit in a book at my feet but I ignore them and step into gloomy darkness, lifting the sword in my grip and looking for something to kill.