citizen dork

And I am ready to work on something else for awhile. I’ve had this thing living in my head for almost five months, and I need a break. Short stories, here I come.

Last night, for the first time in many years, I stayed up until past two in the morning playing a video game with friends. This game was Fez, an indie XBox Live Arcade game that took its primary developer, Phil Fish, almost five years to create. It’s brilliant, and I’ve been thinking about it, video games, fiction, and how the two mediums go about building worlds all day today.

In Fez, you play as Gomez, a little white, rectangle-headed guy in a two-dimensional world inspired by old-school video games who inadvertently discovers the third dimension. The denizens of Gomez’s world consider the third dimension terrifying and very other, kind of a heretical intellectual idea—several refer to the concept of the cube as “the demon square”—in the same way 16-bit Mario and Sonic the Hedgehog, used to traversing a flat plane, might. Once bound to a two-dimensional platformer world anyone who’s ever played a video game programmed before 1995 will recognize, you suddenly find yourself able to rotate the world around and look at it from different angles, while still interacting with it as if it were a flat, two-dimensional image.

Much of the gameplay revolves around this weird collision of Mario and M.C. Escher: chunks of ground that seem separated by great gulfs of space will appear, after a ninety-degree turn to the right, to line up into a bridge. Distances expand and contract. Puzzles reveal their answers—or greater complications—when viewed from a particular side.

But it gets more complicated. Fez takes place in a ruined world, and whoever lived there first had their own system of counting and their own alphabet, which reads from top to bottom, right to left, all of which the game forces you to figure out on your own. I haven’t played all the way to the end, but it seems like you don’t have to understand the alpha-numerical systems in order to beat the game. But if you want to understand what Fez is all about, then you do. And you do want to understand what Fez is all about, because it’s brilliant.

Beyond the insanely clever game mechanics, the aesthetic that is informed by and subverts retro video games, and the awesome puzzles, Fez has a ridiculous attention to detail. There’s no death in Fez, no enemies to defeat, only a multidimensional world to explore and understand. Secret messages and codes are everywhere (it took me several hours of running through its world to figure out that the little squiggles weren’t just decoration, that they actually meant something that I could figure out). Birds and animals frolic in its forests. The music is a cross between 8-bit chiptunes and the ambient stuff the stoner kid you went to school with listened to. Stay in a level long enough and the sun will set, a pixelated starscape will appear and then fade into daylight. The little pixely frogs will croak at sunset and the birds will chirp at daybreak. There are allusions to Mario, Zelda, Twin Peaks, and probably a lot that I’m missing. There are scannable QR codes hidden in the game world. There are ciphers built out of Tetris blocks (another allusion) and sometimes out of the landscape itself. There’s a lot of story and a lot of world-building behind Fez, but the game doesn’t hand it to you. It makes you look for it. It makes you turn it this way and that until you figure shit out on your own.

And, because it’s such an engrossing world, people do. There’s even a tumblr devoted to the batshit notes people take to understand Fez (it’s the first game I’ve played for almost twenty years that forces you to use a pen and paper). From a writer’s standpoint, what I found really interesting was that I was so swept up in this world after only an hour or two of playing it that I too was taking crazy notes.Fez is a piece of art, and it had me in its clutches.

These are taken from that tumblr. My favorite note: “Tilt your head 90 degrees TO THE RIGHT!!” The reviewer for A.V. Club got it right: Fez is best described as a mashed-up distillation of the work of “Shigeru Miyamoto, Søren Kierkegaard, M.C. Escher, and the guy who made Jet Set Willy. With Vangelis on keyboards.”

This got me thinking about video games as devices to explore narrative, and how they work in relation to fiction. When I was playing Fez, I found myself wondering, “Damn, why couldn’t video games have been more like this when I was a kid?” But I think it took a few decades to build up the vocabulary most modern indie platformers use. After all, without knowing that the dark angular shapes at the top of this guy’s notes are Tetris blocks—which indicates Phil Fish, the creator of Fez is drawing on the history of video games to build his own—they’re just meaningless shapes. Braid worked in a similar fashion (the castles, the princess and the protagonist’s quest for her). The video games I was obsessed with when I was a kid just weren’t that smart.

Take for example Chrono Trigger, a game I was so into, watching the clunkily retro intro still gives me chills:

I remember a lot of great narrative sequences from Chrono Trigger: Magus’s castle, storming the Black Omen, delving into the Arris Dome. But when I think about what they comprised, I realize that Chrono Trigger was not very sophisticated in the way it presented its narrative.

To advance the story in Chrono Trigger, you generally had to traverse a dungeon. This meant fighting the same enemies many times, using the same attacks and combos, healing your characters, doing it again, fighting again, doing it all again, over and over and over. There might be a puzzle thrown in every once in a while. Then there’s a big boss fight at the end of the dungeon and the plot gets to click forward another notch. Then repeat. It’s a clumsy, repetitive way of telling a story, and I think this is one of the reasons that Japanese RPGs like Chrono Trigger and the Final Fantasy series waned in popularity after the late nineties. Video game narrativity moved on.

Consider Fez, or Braid, or even Bastion or Shadow of the Colossus. These are games that have jettisoned the idea of telling a story in the same way a novel or a film might, and have embraced what makes video games unique. There isn’t much of what we could identify as “plot,” but there is “experience” that arises from the way the player interacts with the game’s multiple systems. In Fez, like in the best games, the story is in the way you play it. Video games are finally learning to take advantage of their natural medium, interactivity.

I think I picked up a lot of bad lessons on the way stories work from the video games of my youth. Even if you’re writing heroic fantasy, you don’t want to duplicate the format used by Chrono Trigger or Final Fantasy. And in my early writing I did, or I tried to, and it was repetitive and boring. It took me years to learn to use the native strengths of fiction in the same way Fez uses the native strengths of the video game. Fiction is meaning arising from words laid out in blocks of prose called paragraphs. Fiction thrives on the singular action that irrevocably changes the meaning of all other actions within its system; if an action is repeated without a corresponding amplification of an effect (as in Chrono Trigger’s endless battles in dungeons), the system isn’t working as efficiently as it could be.

From when I was ten to when I was fifteen or sixteen or so, I spent more time playing Japanese RPGs than I did reading books. I think sometimes about how I wish I could go back in time and tell myself to put down the fucking Super Nintendo controller and pick up a book (I would also dispense some advice on dating and how to not dress like a half-retarded kid who rolled through a thrift store), but then I think that spending so much time immersed in that me a special perspective. I’ve written before about authors who use video game tropes to explore deeper questions about human existence, and I think it’s a fascinating subject, and one that I’m better equipped to understand because I was such an unrepentant video game nerd when I was a kid. Guess you win some and lose some.

I spent the last week in New Hampshire, visiting the ladyfriend, catching up with old friends and professors. On Tuesday, I sat in on a form and technique class.

It was weird.

I graduated at the end of fall semester 2011, but I was just taking thesis credits for those last few months. The last time I actually attended a class was about a year ago, spring semester of 2011, and I had forgotten how it went. For this class, I had to read three short stories from the most recentBest American Short Stories. The class would talk about them and examine how they were crafted and structured.

I’ve been working in a restaurant for the last few months, far away from the MFA and from academia. Most of my friends here aren’t big readers, and those that are aren’t big writers, so I haven’t been around a lot of writers talking about writing. I had read the stories, but I was still unprepared for a three hour discussion about craft, psychology, Chekhov, allusions, McSweeney’s, narrative distance, dogs in literature, time, white space, multiculturalism, density, quotation marks, etc. etc. etc.

It was awesome, but it was also an overload. I felt like the dude fromScanners.

And, after a while, it started making me nervous. I felt apart from the MFA culture. I’ve been writing a novel for four months, along with an occasional short-short or chunk of a short story. I started to wonder if, in the deep silence of post-MFA life, I was still ableto write stories with the narrative and stylistic complexity that MFA students love. That I love. I had a bit of a freakout. Why are we talking this much about these stories? Do short stories have to be minutely dissected, or can we just enjoy them and let them be? I thought about how you can tell and enjoy a joke, but as soon as someone tries to explain whyit’s funny, it ceases being funny.

It made me think about how the MFA is an artificial place. One of the stories we read was “Gurov in Manhattan” by Ehud Havazelet. In this story, rich with allusions to Anton Chekhov’s “The Lady with the Dog,” a failed Russian intellectual and expat walks his dog and tries to get it to take a shit (the dog is dying of an intestinal blockage; SPOILER ALERT: the dog shits in the end). He thinks about a failed relationship with a much younger woman. He thinks about surviving cancer and cancer treatment. He thinks about how the pretty young waitress looks through him as if he’s not there. It’s a good story, I guess, as long as you understand how he’s playing off Chekhov, alluding to a whole world of intellectualism, and if you can follow the twists and turns of the narrator’s thought process. In the surface, though, it’s a story about a guy who walks around Manhattan for a little while, then his dog takes a shit. That’s it. That’s all that happens. It’s not exactly the kind of story I’m going to shove into the hands of my family and friends and tell them that theyjust have to read it!It’s the kind of story that works for other writers, and people who teach literature classes in colleges, and that’s about it.

The MFA is a gateway into understanding and appreciating stories like this. It’s not necessarily the gateway into understanding and appreciating fiction that actual people would want to read. But good writing is good writing. And, considering how many times I’ve dogged on “the MFA story,” (of which “Gurov in Manhattan” is a good example, I think) I of all people should know that writing something that’s appealing to MFA students is not the same as writing something that’s appealing to normal people.

The class also made me realize the value of the MFA. Sure a joke stops being funny when you explain it, and a piece of writing loses some of its magic when you start thinking deeply about how it works under the hood, but, as an MFA graduate, I’m in a privileged position: the main reason I can appreciate short stories is because I’ve been trained to understand them. I can shut off my brain and enjoy the subtleties of a joke because I’ve picked apart a thousand other jokes.

It’s weird to feel frustrated with something and dwell on its shortcomings and miss the hell out of it and be thankful for it all at the same time.