(Instead of using the album cover a second time, here’s a picture of Castleton performing live)

The third track off the EP, “2038″, describes the narrator losing his job as a computer programmer for the second day in a row. Because of the severity of his drug problem, the narrator has forgotten that he was fired the day before and come back to work: “It must’ve seemed strange when I came into the office/on the next day, like as if nothing had changed.”

“2038″, like “2045″’s description of a marriage, fits an entire career into a short song. We find out about the dynamic between the narrator and his boss (Victor is younger and learned everything about the job from the narrator), the atmosphere of the office, and why he’s being fired. The narrator has “never made much of an effort to get along,” so there’s tension between him and his co-workers. He’s that employee that doesn’t do much anymore, but has been around forever and is difficult to get rid of.

The chorus of the song is the most we get of another character’s direct speech on the EP:

Take a year off, maybe you can come back.
You’ve done some good work, it hasn’t always been bad.
You’ve written good code, taught me most of what I know,
but you’ve been distracted and we have to let you go.

The boss spins the narrator’s termination quite a bit. We find out the narrator “shoved this girl” when he found out the coffee wasn’t ready. He’s probably never going to be offered another job by the company if he physically assaulted a female co-worker, but the boss just wants him to go away, so he’s being falsely optimistic.

The other employees aren’t described, but the narrator is embarrassed when he realizes he’s already been fired because “even though the door was shut, he knew that they’d be staring.” Though Victor tries to keep the narrator calm, the seriousness of the situation is emphasized again when “Jim and Barry came along to escort [him] out.”

All of the details in the song, including the drug-slurred voice Castleton uses for the narrator’s lines, indicate the work environment the character is being gently coaxed out of. Memory loss and violence seem to be symptoms of his addiction, and we can see how this episode could lead to the narrator’s divorce and abandonment in a hotel room.

Tracks 4 & 5, “2031″ and “2020,” develop the narrator’s relationship with his children and explain the anxiety that leads him to drug addiction. In “2031,” Sarah, the narrator’s wife, buys their son, Chris, a guitar for his birthday. The narrator is upset that Sarah did this without consulting him, but the underlying reason for his anger is that he doesn’t want to be reminded his abandoned pursuit of music. So he breaks the guitar one night when Chris won’t listen to him:

Finally, for once ever, Chris looked scared.
He bolted out the door and downstairs.
Sarah came up to see what all the fuss was about.
When she saw the guitar she started freaking out,
telling me how I’m taking my own life out on my kids.
She was calm when she said,
“You won’t be happy until nobody is.”

He’s satisfied when he scares his son, so Sarah’s criticism seems reasonable, but the narrator remains sympathetic because no one tries to understand why he’s upset. Sarah asks him why he doesn’t get his keyboard down from the attic to play along with Chris instead of getting angry, but he plays it off: “I laughed too quick and told her I wasn’t about to encourage this assault on our senses, but the truth is I couldn’t play a song if my pension depended on it.”

His anxiety centers around a loss of control, which the song’s chorus describes:

In the attic/in the corner/under sheets
I found my keyboard/put my fingers/on the right keys
but couldn’t find/a single chord/and
if my hands can forget all the songs that they wrote and the parts that they played
in the albums they made/who’s to say that they won’t just forget everything
one day/can’t cook/can’t code/can’t feel
my job, my skills demand/my hands
all wrong/paycheck/all gone.

The reason he’s anxious and unhappy to begin with, as we learn in “2011,” is his decision to give up music and return to school; but if he can forget everything about the one passion in his life, what happens if he loses the other skills he relies on to live and making a living, or even the ability to feel anything at all. Because of the album’s structure, we know that the narrator’s anxiety is valid. He’s on a self-destructive downward spiral that will result in exactly what he fears.

In “2020,” he takes his kids, Chris and Zooey, to the park while Sarah cleans the house for a party. He’s begun to worry about his health:

Two nights this week I dreamed that my teeth crumbled when I tried to eat.
When I wake up my gums feel weak – I make the kids brush their teeth til their mouths bleed.
I feel ambushed by my body or at least a little misled,
as if the blood that moves my parts can’t keep up with commands coming from my head.

The narrator’s dreams are another aspect of his anxiety over losing control. While his kids are playing, he watches a girl running laps around the track: “I watch the muscles sing in her thighs.” The girl’s youth and health are things the narrator is afraid of losing. When he turns back a woman is helping his daughter off the playground equipment. She misinterprets his reasons for staring at the running girl, saying, “Maybe you should keep your eyes on your own child.” He gathers Chris and Zooey and goes to the pharmacy for his prescription, because he can “feel the panic starting.”

“2011″ reveals the mistake the narrator refers to in “2045,” the turning point in his life, through the end of a prior relationship. His girlfriend, Keta, cheats on him with a musician, and he can’t figure out what he’s done wrong:

She wanted more stability, she wanted more attention
and I just wanted to have less tension between us
I told her I could change my whole life if she’d be happy
when she said I’d never change, I called her a defeatist.

And then I did it – I put a knife in the thing I loved most
It was music that I burned at the stake,
as a toast to the girl and the world that I want to be a part of.
Maybe going back to school was when I started to lose.

“2011″ seems like a bit of a misstep in the narrative flow, since introducing a second relationship into a story this compressed feels disjointed. Continuing with Sarah would have added complexity to the entire narrative. If he caught Sarah cheating and confronted her, that information would influence the way both characters are viewed in previous songs on a second listen.

I’m also not completely sold on the narrator’s motivation for continuing to pursue his college degree after breaking up with Keta (italics mine): “I’m gonna prove to her world that I can always follow through.” Proving a point to the “adult world” by entering that world out of spite doesn’t seem reasonable, but it makes sense that he would stubbornly pursue his relationship with Sarah, even after finding out about her affair, because he’s already changed his whole life so “she’d” be happy.

Everyone’s got an opinion, as the saying goes, but this narrative blip doesn’t detract from my appreciation of the EP. I do wonder, however, if since the EP’s timeline is approaching the present of 2007, that maybe “2011″ is an extrapolation of a real life situation. In my own writing, I’ve often found it difficult to give up reality in order to tell the best story. Anyway, I could play guessing games until a new century rolls around if Castleton is right about the increased lifespan, but let’s continue.

The final track, “2007,” explains the narrator’s frustration with his musical career and his motivation for leaving it:

. . . when you have no luck to start with, you’ve nothing to part with,
and I’m not mad that I don’t have it,
I’m mad that luck should have anything to do with being an artist.

[. . .]

There was a time when I thought that I could change the country
with a few choice raps and some odd time beats,
but noise plus noise equals noise,
and the only way that noise can make silence is defeat.

The narrator has reached the point in an artist’s life where idealism hits reality. Dramatic irony drives the tension in this song. We know what happens when the narrator abandons music from the songs leading up to “2007,” but at this point he’s optimistic about giving up on his dreams:

This is not how I wanna spend the rest of my life
’cause I got it in my head that I had to stand for something?
Once you get pass that the future actually looks bright.

The lyrics do a wonderful job of depicting the sort of rationalization people go through when considering whether to stop expending the massive amounts of sweat and tears that go into pursuing a poorly paid dream. Giving up the pursuit of a dream can be an enormous weight off your shoulders, but it’s possible to lose more than just the strain. When the narrator gives up music, he also loses the only thing that anchors him and provides a sense of control in his life. Without a dream to follow, he has nothing to strive toward.

And in under 20 minutes, we’ve experienced most of a person’s life. Hopefully, we’re all inspired to continue pursuing our passions instead of hopelessly depressed about the inevitability of failure and death! A Bullet, A Lever, A Key tells an old story worth repeating, that people should pursue their own course through life instead of letting someone else choose for them. Telling the story in reverse allows Castleton to painfully layer the consequences before revealing their origin, which gives the character’s decision to abandon his dreams the entire suffocating weight of his failed life.

Now that you’ve read about Gavin Castleton’s potential future if he can’t make music viable as a career, I’ll point you once again to the place you can buy his stuff. I’m going to hold off on looking at his most recent album, Home, until the New Year, so you’ll have plenty of time to listen to it on his website, gavincastleton.com, and maybe even buy a copy so he’ll continue to make music instead of becoming a computer programmer with a drug addiction and a failed marriage. How’s that for a guilt trip?

This seven song EP tells the story of my life backwards – from my suicide in a New Jersey hotel room in 2054 to present day 2007, in the backroom of Lupo’s Heartbreak Hotel after a show. The music is a cross-breed of progressive rock rhythms and hip hop instrumentation. Lyrically, each song travels eight or nine years back in time to depict a telling scene in my tragic timeline. Over the course of the record, various clues unveil the catalyst of my downfall: the decision to leave music for the seemingly greener pastures of corporate life. The album is a rendering of how my life could look if I stopped doing what makes me happy and started following a more adulty path.

- Gavin Castleton

A Bullet, A Lever, A Key is Gavin Castleton’s prog-hop mini-epic about a fictional alternate life where he gives up music to go to college and join the ranks of the cubicle-bound office world. Each of the EP’s seven tracks is named after a different year and the story is told in reverse chronology (“2054,” “2045,” “2038,” “2031,” “2020,” “2011,” & “2007″). The narrative begins with Castleton’s suicide at age 76, so tension is immediately established and most of what drives the story is finding out how the narrator reached such a desperate point in his life.

Since the EP begins in year 2054, the story also has some subtle science fictional elements: an extended lifespan (Castleton’s ex-boss hopes to live to 140 through the use of “enhancers, attachments, and stuff”) and holograms instead of photographs. Though these SF elements could have been distracting, there are only two, and the extended lifespan is particularly interesting because the narrator ends his life at 76, which would typically be near the end of our lifespans anyway. What effects would living through almost an entire extra life have on our society? An increase in the number of suicides seems likely.

On the opening track “2054″, Castleton immediately grounds the listener in the concrete:

For three days I’ve carried all my stuff down from the attic
and cut it up into two piles:
the things that hurt I threw into the bathtub and burned.
The things that made me smile, I cleaned them up,
and set them up in rows around my bed

The use of objects from the narrator’s past works well to establish an emotional connection between the listener and the character. We learn through a bound copy of a dissertation that the narrator was raised by a single mother with four kids, but she still “fought eight years” for a PhD. The mother’s struggle to complete something personally meaningful despite hardship foreshadows the narrator’s failure to continue pursuing his own passion.

The second object is the narrator’s son’s diploma:

Then I picked up Chris’ diploma from Brown University,
and I remember how he asked me not to attend the ceremony,
but I hid in the back when he walked up to get it,
and my heart screamed his name when they said it.

The narrator and Chris are estranged, which creates tension without an explanation, but that the character still cares for his son. He also finds a picture of himself as a young man that he had forgotten about. The photograph is the only thing he has from the period in his life when he was truly happy. It shows him backstage after a musical performance with a girl, and though he doesn’t seem to recognize the girl, he knows they’re in love.

The hopeful look on that face makes me wince.
I haven’t seen that look, haven’t seen that face since.
I take it into the bathroom – light it up and throw it in.

Since this is the only object in the song that the narrator describes burning, it gains additional narrative weight. Seeing an object from this period in the his life causes him pain, and gives the listener a clue to what initially started him on the path toward suicide.

Castleton uses the list of objects to establish a history for the narrator in a short amount of time. Starting any narrative with the narrator’s suicide is risky because it’s difficult to give death meaning without an established connection to the character, and in the even more constrictive confines of a song, the risk is greater.

I smelled Zooey’s baby clothes,
my first program code,
the leotards I wore when I was just four years old,
the first cartoon I drew,
Chris’ first pair of shoes . . .

Similar to Tim O’Brien’s short story, “The Things They Carried,” Castleton uses the list of objects to describe the character and develop an emotional connection to the character for the listener without having to spend a lot of time in development. Listeners understand how the narrator feels about each object because they have similar objects that are important to them. The quantity of objects with emotional significance to the narrator communicate the length of his life and what he’s giving up by ending that life.

Castleton doesn’t mention suicide directly in the song. Only the method is implied:

I empty out the medicine cabinet into my shaky hands.
My fingers look so new for a second I wonder who I am.
I quickly stow them away, back in my pants.

This indirect method of describing difficult subject matter works well, especially since the story is told through the character’s voice. There’s no way to artfully have a character say, “I’m going to commit suicide,” and since the narrator has already made his decision, it would be awkward to mention it directly. The narrator also suggests suicide at the end of the song:

Some people feel like the world wants them around, and that’s fine.
I decided 10 years ago that I don’t want all that time . . .
For me 76 is enough.
For me 76 was too much.

The extended lifespan of the character also adds emotional weight, since the suicide of a 76-year-old is different from a younger person’s. We can assume that the narrator has contemplated ending his life for quite a while, and that he truly may have little to live for. The way he plans his suicide is methodical. He burns everything that hurt him and then sets the few things that make him happy on display, as a memorial to the good things in his life.

The second track, “2045,” describes the end of the narrator’s marriage. His wife delivers divorce papers for him to sign at a hotel room where he’s staying. Since the story is told through the narrator’s voice, we only hear his side of the story regarding the cause of the divorce, but other problems are suggested in the chorus:

It’s pathetic, but everything came down to whether or not I was rich.
She tells me it wasn’t the money,
but I find it funny that losing my job is what toggled the switch.
She says it’s painful to be in the house with me,
but never complained when she had half my salary.
She says that I have a problem with pills;
the real problem is all the credit card bills.

A drug problem is referenced, but the narrator believes his wife, Sarah, only stayed with him previously because of his paycheck. The narrator explains the reasons he used the pills:

I took the pills because they were there,
and they evened me out . . . make me act right.

No, I took the pills because I don’t dare
to be thinking about the mistake of my life.

The “mistake” the narrator mentions creates tension for the listener, and suggests that a single decision he made led to his addiction, divorce, and suicide. Though the “pills” aren’t specifically named, they seem to be for anxiety.

Castleton is able to develop a complex relationship quickly by describing the dynamics within the marriage. Aside from the financial dynamic described in the chorus, the narrator asks Sarah, “How can they expect us to raise our own replacements? It’s insane!” suggesting that he doesn’t feel capable of raising children. Castleton doesn’t allow Sarah to appear completely blameless, however, which would cheapen the impact of the song:

She tells the kids that I ruined her life.
What kind of wife – what kind of human tells that to her children?
About their father!
Even if I did want to get better, why bother?

The narrator’s question about raising children as “replacements,” along with Sarah telling the children their father ruined her life, suggests a complex relationship between two complex characters, and all within a three and a half minute song. That kind of narrative compression is impressive, and makes Castleton’s music worthwhile to examine. Writing a complex, compelling short story is more difficult in some ways than writing a novel, and by word count, Castleton’s lyrics are flash fiction. This Blaise Pascal quote comes to mind, “I would have written a short letter, but I did not have the time.”

I’m sure that quote could also apply to this post, especially if I continued through to its conclusion, but you’ll have to wait until tomorrow to read about the rest of A Bullet, A Lever, A Key. I would like to encourage everyone who’s reading to purchase the EP so that they can listen along. The digital version is only 6 dollars, and you can listen to tracks “2038″ and “2007″ for free, which I’ll discuss tomorrow.

]]> http://theautumnalcity.com/criticism/a-bullet-a-lever-a-key-one/feed/ 0 http://theautumnalcity.com/criticism/hospital-hymns/ http://theautumnalcity.com/criticism/hospital-hymns/#comments Thu, 10 Dec 2009 14:21:34 +0000 Travis Megill http://theautumnalcity.com/?p=803

Hospital Hymns I wrote because I was working in a Hospital stockroom for a stint and there was this little closet-sized “chapel” that was just off of ICU. It was the only carpeted area besides an office in Women’s Care, and I thought it was strange to have this little haven for the religious in the midst of all this science and sterility. It seemed thoroughly disproportionate to the amount of emotional events that were filling up the halls everywhere else in the building. And there were heavy debates about spirituality and religion coursing through my family at the time, so I wanted to design a character that would polarize my listeners, and maybe have them assess where they lie on that spiritual graph, so to speak.

- Gavin Castleton

Hospital Hymns is narrated by a 76-year-old orderly at a hospital. The narrator describes his interactions with co-workers and patients as he goes about his work day, specifically focusing on the man’s religious beliefs. The EP is more of a character sketch than a story, since the listener’s perception of the narrator changes as he or she learns more about the character, but he doesn’t change significantly himself.

Sympathy for the narrator is developed in a number of ways. In the opening song, “Hymn 1: Maternity in G Major,” the hospital is described, and the man pauses for a moment to appreciate the sunlight, which he doesn’t see often during the course of his workday:

There,
reaching out
to touch my nose
and make me sneeze,
the Lord gave his sun to me.

This song introduces the setting and the narrator’s religious beliefs, and also develops sympathy for the narrator as he takes a moment during his workday to appreciate the warmth of sunlight on his face.

In “Women’s Care in E Flat Minor,” the second song, the elderly man’s personality is revealed through humor:

When I took the elevator down it was all by myself.
So I sang that Usher song,
but I got the words all wrong.
But I always say when you’re alone you can make up the words yourself.

And then by introducing the man’s forgiving nature and describing his religious beliefs:

Jessica snapped at me,
but I know the Lord tells us we should turn the other cheek,
and Lord knows that Jess has had an awful week,
so I dropped two crates and turned around to leave.

Jessica’s reaction to the narrator introduces conflict. She doesn’t appreciate him, and she’s not the only one who’s inconsiderate toward him. At the end of the song, a doctor the narrator shares the elevator with won’t speak to him, even after he says hello. In fact, the doctor “let[s] out a massive sigh/like he couldn’t breath from the same air as I did.” The narrator is unperturbed, however, and ends the song by saying, “I tried to love them all.”

The narrator’s mistreatment by his co-workers creates tension because no reason is given for his co-workers to be disgusted or frustrated with him. The doctor’s reaction, in particular, seems to be based on the gap between social status that exists between an orderly and a doctor. Though the listener learns more about the narrator, and may develop similar feelings about him for different reasons, there’s no indication that his co-workers know anything about him.

It’s interesting that the conflict revealed in “Women’s Care in E Flat Minor,” presumably based on the social hierarchy of the hospital, isn’t specifically explored as the album continues, but the tension created from that conflict is transferred to listeners as they begin to learn more about the narrator. The initial social tension lets listeners know that everything isn’t going to be sunbeams and Usher songs, so they aren’t jarred when the narrator behaves strangely.

The perception of the narrator changes dramatically when he tries to help two patients, forcing listeners to question their trust in the elderly man. The first is a sick, little boy with “a tube in each limb/I could see through his skin.” The boy’s parents are present, but he’s still scared, so the narrator tries to comfort him by saying, “God wants you back.” This may seem like a perfectly lovely thing to say from the narrator’s perspective, but a child with a serious illness probably doesn’t need to be reminded about the possibility of death by a stranger. The narrator’s implacable faith seems to disrupt his ability to see the effect his actions have on others.

When the narrator tries to help a second patient, the results are immediate and serious. In the last song, “Hymn 5: E.R. in E Flat Major,” the elderly man enters the emergency room after a “pile-up on 95.” A woman calls out to him in a hallway, asking for an end to her suffering:

“Please stop this pain.
We are all alone, just the three of us again.

and as I pulled the tube from her mouth,
she drifted off to sleep,
singing to the sky,
and scrunching up the sheets.

“Oh God
Oh Lord
I’m home.”

The woman asks for her pain to stop, and references “the three of us,” herself, the orderly, and God, also an allusion to the Trinity, so the narrator kills her. There’s no consideration of whether killing the woman is the right thing to do. He doesn’t even recognize that it’s not his responsibility to make a life or death decision for another person at all.

This scene, the narrative and musical climax of the EP, insists upon a reevaluation of the narrator. It’s interesting that Castleton’s intent is to polarize listeners, because after my first listen I admired the narrator’s unflinching adherence to his faith in the idea that life after death is a wonderful experience that everyone’s invited to. After thinking about it, and listening again, I find the narrator rather horrifying. The description of the emergency room from the elderly man’s perspective decided it for  me.

The narrator’s reaction to the victims of the car wreck that fill the E.R. shows a sort of inhumanity caused by his faith in God and the afterlife:

I’d never seen so much color in my life.

How can they be so afraid when the father’s so near?
Doesn’t everybody know that the arm of the Lord is severe?

He has no sympathy for the people around him, though they are in pain and possibly dying. His belief in God’s influence makes it illogical for him to feel anything except confusion about why everyone else is so upset. Since he is unable to empathize with other people’s pain, and cannot recognize perspectives other than his own, the narrator’s behavior seems more sociopathic than devoutly religious.

The conflict in Hospital Hymns is developed around a single viewpoint character. The narrator is sympathetic, though perhaps misguided throughout the first four hymns, but as listeners learn more about the effect the man’s faith has on others and the way he views the world in the fifth and final hymn, his unfailing “kindness” becomes a flaw. The character’s religion becomes delusion.

Castleton has obviously succeeded in polarizing me. I can’t seem to find a valid defense for the character, but I’d be interested in discussing the songs with someone from the other pole, as long as they remain a comfortably safe distance away from me.

Tomorrow we’ll take a look at A Bullet, A Lever, A Key. The character developed over the course of its narrative is more complex than the narrator from Hospital Hymns. Though the EP is less than twenty minutes long, ABALAK covers most of the narrator’s life by focusing on the specific and significant moments that define the character’s arc.

The older I get, the more tenuous my connection to music seems to grow. In high school and college, the music I listened to and performed were part of how I defined myself, but now I’ll go for weeks without sitting down to listen to an album, or even a single song. When I drive somewhere, more often than not, I’ll turn off the radio and just sit in silence.

Losing that connection, however, makes it that much more exciting to find an artist  that makes me want to listen to music as obsessively as I used to. Gavin Castleton, a musician from Providence, Rhode Island, has done just that. I’ve been a fan of his band, Gruvis Malt, for a few years, but his most recent solo material is what has grabbed me and won’t let go.

Castleton’s music is stylistically diverse, and his subject matter is varied: an EP of falsetto pop songs based on hymn structures, another of progressive hip hop describing his life in reverse from his suicide in 2054, and an album about a relationship told through the metaphor of a zombie apocalypse are just a few examples.

I don’t know enough about music to confidently describe why Castleton’s interests me. It’s consistently surprising and reveals itself through repeated listens, but the common thread that runs through “Hospital Hymns,” “A Bullet, A Lever, A Key,” and Home, the two EP’s and an album described above, is the use of narrative. All three tell stories with well-developed characters and conflict, and though they could have been written traditionally, they are enriched by their realization in a form not known for strong narrative.

So what does this have to do with video games? Nothing really; but examining how other forms of art incorporate narrative successfully without sacrificing quality is a worthwhile exercise for both writers and game designers.

I’ve learned a lot as a writer while listening to Castleton’s music by recognizing the methods of storytelling I know in a new context, such as establishing the speaker in dialogue through movement and voice instead of “he said, she said” tags, describing scenes and conflict using concrete details instead of abstractions, developing characters through word choice and sentence structure, and the list goes on.

In my next three posts, I plan to examine “Hospital Hymns,” “A Bullet, A Lever, A Key,” and Home separately and in detail, not only because I listen to them obsessively and want to share them with others, but also because I think there’s something to learn from my attachment to this specific music. Gavin Castleton tells stories effectively in his medium and I want to know how he does it.

For anyone interested in listening to the music before I pick it apart, a track or two from each of the EP’s are available for free on Integers Only, Castleton’s independent label, and buying both in digital format is only 10 bucks. The album, Home, is freely available in its entirety as a stream on Castleton’s website, but I recommend the physical disc because it comes with a lyrics booklet.

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

But the denouement is most neglected in video games where it is often relegated to a short congratulatory cut scene, or at most–a slide show of consequences. This month’s topic challenges you to explore how the denouement can be expressed as gameplay.

Since I’ve recently started learning Inform 7, it seemed like a good idea to focus on an IF design that incorporates denouement. This design is beyond my abilities at the moment, but hopefully as I continue to learn the software, I’ll attempt coding this at some point.

Denouement as gameplay is the challenge for this month, so I decided to skip the other elements of dramatic structure and try to design a game that exists purely to unravel a plot. The player starts at the end of a high school dance, as the final notes of the last slow dance fade away. The lights turn on and the DJ shuts off the disco ball. Students, chaperones, and the few odd college kids still dating high school girls head for the exit.

All that remains are piles of glitter, scraps of shiny ribbon, and the aftermath of a complex web of teenage love, betrayal, and heartbreak. A cluster of girls comfort a crying friend in the corner. A young teacher holding ice against a black eye is glaring at a football player leaning against the doors to the locker room. The school principal is scrubbing graffiti off the wall behind the visiting team’s hoop. And so on…

The player exists outside of this situation, and is even described as “the player” within the game. The player’s inventory is located inside a large trashcan. The janitor, tired of kids and eager to get home, began sweeping up all the crap under the gym bleachers during the final dance. The trash consists of a torn love letter scribbled during Algebra class, two promise rings with matching initials, an unopened package of birth control pills, an empty can of spray paint, a deflated basketball with white powder inside, and “The End,” a mysterious object that the player can’t use until he sends each of the characters home for the night.

Everything has already happened, but it’s the player’s job to decide how the characters got there and how their nights will end. This may seem like a mystery game, but instead of figuring out what happened, the player will unravel the plot by setting up relationships between each of the characters and the various items in the trashcan. Here’s a relatively simple example of three commands the player might enter:

Jessica liked John, John gave Jessica promise ring, Jessica loves John.

After setting up the relationship, the player can ask each character about items or other characters, and examine characters and items for additional description. The information given is determined by the commands, so the player controls each character’s final state.

The easiest denouement for the game would involve pairing up all of the characters, and associating each pair with one of the items, but the solutions would become more interesting if the player complicates the web of relationships (also, undoubtedly, making the game increasingly difficult to program). At any time, the player will be able to use a history command with a character’s name or an item to see what relationships have been set up, and will also have the ability to erase the histories and start over. The order the commands are entered will affect the results.

So a potential web of relationships could go something like this:

Principal disliked John, John gave Principal basketball, Principal loved John, Principal found spraypaint, Principal hates John.

Using like/love, dislike/hate to indicate level of emotion will affect the outcome. After entering the commands, the player can ask the principal about John, the basketball, the powder, or the graffiti and the principal would respond with the appropriate sentences:

“I’ve always thought John was a bad apple, but he did a good thing bringing that deflated basketball to me.”

“Of course I had to find out what the powder was. It could have been dangerous. So I took a taste and suddenly I felt like a college student again.”

“I haven’t been that high since I spray-painted genitalia on the mascot statue the night before Homecoming.”

“You can tell I haven’t painted in years. That looks more like a peeled banana than…uh…just wait until I get that delinquent John in my office on Monday morning.”

Obviously different outcomes would occur if other relationships were set up (present tense would denote the character’s final emotional state):

John loved Jessica, John gave Eddie love letter, Jessica hates John, Jessica gave John unopened birth control, John hates Jessica, John found basketball.

So players could set up all kinds of romantic and tragic endings for the characters (apparently I prefer tragic, or comic?). Once all the character histories are set up, the player can either ask each character about the outcome, or simply examine “The End” object to watch the histories unfold in order. Based on which order the characters were given commands, the denouement could change, with one history affecting the next, which would build to a final conclusion (if feasible).

Since each of the characters positions are set as the dance ends (the falling action is complete), the player’s options are limited to a certain extent. The amount of back story available to the player by examining the scene and the characters before setting up relationships could be altered based on whatever constraints are needed to actually program the game. The player’s ultimate goal is to provide a denouement for the scene set at the opening of the game. For the game to end, all of the conflicts suggested by the scene must be resolved.

Hopefully this counts as both denouement and gameplay. I’m sure it could be argued that the player is setting up the entire plot, but the initial scene would be set up in a way that both allows the player a certain amount of freedom and also suggests a dramatic structure that simply needs to be finished.

Please take a look at the other entries submitted to the Round Table this month using the dropdown box below.

Attending PAX in Seattle this year was a delight that included many ‘firsts’ for me. It was my first time on the West Coast, my first time at any type of convention, gaming or otherwise, and my first time meeting many of the folks I talk to on a daily basis about games. Roaming the Expo floor and trying a few upcoming games was fun, but not nearly as exciting as spending time with people I’d previously only known by their words.

Another first for me was participating in a tabletop role-playing session. Corvus Elrod and Rachel Zakariasen, from the Zakelro! story studio, spent much of the weekend demonstrating the HoneyComb Engine, a storytelling system that “empowers the participants.” I have to admit I was fairly intimidated by the idea of trying a ‘pen and paper’ role-playing game, especially surrounded by hundreds of more experienced tabletop gamers. It’s one thing to fail miserably while trying out Uncharted 2 on the show floor, but the potential embarrassment that may occur during a game that actually requires imagination and creativity, as well as an understanding of a brand new set of rules, was almost too much.

After watching only a few minutes of the scenario that was ongoing when I arrived, however, I forgot my anxiety. The HCE rules are very intuitive, and with Corvus and Rachel present to guide the storytellers, became transparent enough to support creativity. As a framework for storytelling, the HoneyComb Engine worked fabulously to encourage each teller to add their mark to the story being developed.

Instead of repeating the details of our session, I’ll direct you to Corvus’s post on our session and just comment on my personal experience. Since I’m in the revision process for a collection of linked short stories, I was interested in the HoneyComb Engine’s ability to model scenarios without combat or even physical action of any kind that didn’t define a character in a literary sense. Could this system be used to model a conversation? Would the game function as a writing tool? So I asked (challenged?) Corvus, and he delivered!

Using the character prompts, each accompanied by a secret and a suspicion, we explored the situation the four family members were in, developing the relationships between the characters. I found myself emotionally involved in the story, and instead of being confused and hindered by the rules, which I expected as a first time player, they were motivating. While waiting for my character’s chance to speak, I thought about what my character would do in the situation, and then used the framework provided by the HCE to build my responses as part of the larger story being told by the other participants.

The conflict timing mechanic, in particular, seemed to work very well once the storytellers got the hang of it. Since we became emotionally involved in the characters, without the timing mechanic, our conversation would have lacked shape. We probably would have ended up shouting at each other, arguing our respective character’s position without thinking about how the character would express him or herself. The timing mechanic gave the entire experience dramatic tension. It also shaped the direction of the conversation, because my character’s opportunity to speak was governed by his previous actions and the effect other characters’ actions had on him. Though simple, the mechanic forced each storyteller to consider how his or her character would react instead of forcing his or her reactions on the character.

The Influences available to each character also shaped how the story played out. Since each character had strengths and weaknesses, the storyteller had some guidance as far as how the character would react. The guidance is subtle, though, so for example, my character may have been physically and emotionally intimidating, but not manipulative. The HoneyComb Engine suggests a range of possibility, but allows the storytellers to determine what works and what doesn’t.

From my perspective, HCE made the storytelling process both exciting and nearly effortless. Since multiple storytellers were working together to explore a story, I never felt frustrated like I sometimes do while developing my fiction. Instead, I let my character wait before speaking and allowed one of the other storytellers to step in and give me something to work with. Even used individually, however, I think the system provides a framework that would encourage the development of a story. I can’t wait to attempt to apply it to my own storytelling when the manual is released.

Thanks to Corvus and Rachel for helping us through the session, and to my fellow storytellers, Joe Tortuga, Deirdra Kiai, and Max Battcher. It was a great experience, and I can’t wait to see how others use the HoneyComb Engine for their own purposes. The possibilities are legion.

Arkham Asylum is a hellish place–a collection of every stereotype that exists about treating the mentally ill. Electricity used as punishment, violent, inhuman patients, and a focus on captivity vs. treatment. Batman’s job is to make sure all of the villains contained in the Gothic structure stay there, where they can’t hurt anyone, even themselves. For a game released in 2009, it contains ideas that seem archaic, but no one seems to be bothered by them.

I made some statements on Twitter the other night about feeling uncomfortable while playing Arkham Asylum because of its depiction of mental illness. My friend Justin Keverne and I debated for a while, and then he suggested we write about it in a longer form. He wrote a post about the issue at his blog, Groping the Elephant, which I’ll be referencing. I’m not interested in comparing Arkham Asylum’s treatment of the mentally ill to Resident Evil 5. That doesn’t seem very productive, and my previous comment about Batman being “worse” than RE5 was based entirely on the fact that the enemies in that game are zombies, while Arkham Asylum doesn’t have that excuse. The only thing that makes Batman’s enemies inhuman is their mental illness.

Justin says that “the history of the treatment of the mentally ill has not been consistently just or humane, [but] it does not carry the same associated cultural cachet so played upon in those initial trailers for Resident Evil 5.” While I don’t want to make any comparisons between racism and how people with mental illness are treated, I think there is a significant “cultural cachet” associated with mental illness that is tragic because it isn’t recognized and brought up for discussion nearly as often as race, probably because those suffering from severe mental illness are in no position to defend themselves, and people with less severe forms of mental illness are ashamed of it and don’t want to talk about their experiences. There’s a tendency to associate mental illness with only its severe forms, while illnesses like depression and anxiety, which almost everyone deals with at one time or another, are ignored. Arkham Asylum does a very poor job of addressing the stigma of mental illness by contributing to the myth that people experiencing it are “other.”

Batman doesn’t kill, but he beats the patients of Arkham Asylum into submission so they can be returned to their cells. He’s a hero because he keeps the streets of Gotham City clear of “normal” criminals (though many of them are possibly suffering from mental illness) like the enemy types imported from Blackgate, Gotham City’s correctional facility, as well as those admitted to the asylum. The illnesses the villains have in the game are never identified, they’re just “crazy,” a term that stigmatizes mental illness. One of the enemy types is simply called, “lunatic.” Why doesn’t the game identify what these people are suffering from? Probably because it wouldn’t be nearly as satisfying to repeatedly punch and kick an enemy type called, “John, a person suffering from bipolar disorder,” or “Jeff, a person suffering from schizophrenia.” This may seem ridiculous to bring up, after all, it’s “just a Batman game,” but the same kind of stigma is attached to people in the real world, and isolates people with these diseases.

My discomfort with the game would not be alleviated by giving Batman a stun dart to eliminate these enemies. The entire environment the game takes place in contributes to the stigma of mental illness, and lacks any sort of depth or commentary that the comics may or may not supply (I haven’t read them). I’m also not satisfied with the argument that Batman’s violence is simply self-defense. His attacks are not intended for self-defense, they’re intended to harm, whether the victim is listed as “unconscious” when he’s disabled or not. The action sequences would be much less entertaining if Batman only used approved methods of self-defense to subdue his opponents. I rarely let the enemy approach me and attack first, to make sure that he didn’t just want a hug. Instead, I threw a razor sharp Batarang at the patient to knock him to the floor, and then pounced on his back and slammed his head against the concrete floor. The distinction between patients from Arkham and the criminals brought in from Blackgate is meaningless because the player’s approach to neutralizing them is the same.

Batman: Arkham Asylum is not alone in its disturbing depiction of mental illness. In Condemned, Ethan Thomas brutually dispatches violent homeless people, many of them may have a mental illness. Even Psychonauts, one of my favorite games, has an area where Raz “cures” various characters of their mental illnesses by solving puzzles in their minds, a hopelessly naive method of treatment for someone suffering from a severe mental illness. The paranoia exhibited by Boyd, the security guard at the asylum, is logical and easily fixed. Other characters simply need help overcoming an issue in their past, and magically their problems disappear. But at least Psychonauts attempts to de-stigmatize the characters suffering from mental illness, and Raz is trying to help them instead of keep them within the asylum.

I’m not interested in making people feel guilty for playing Batman: Arkham Asylum, or stirring up some controversy to make people avoid playing it. The game simply presents an opportunity to bring up an issue that doesn’t get enough attention. I plan to continue enjoying the fantasy of inhabiting the character of Batman, and would recommend the game to others. I would suggest, however, that anyone interested in finding out more about the stigma of mental illness visit NAMI’s website for more information.

“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.