graywolf essay

To Garrett, a half-hour in the forest felt like five. He kept checking his watch, checking the path, checking the birdsong. His anxiety had become pervasive. His phone buzzed: [[a text from Wilbur.]] Even seeing the name pop up soothed him a little. The move had been hard on both of them; when Wilbur moved the familiar suddenly became strange again. Even this forest. He'd seen some of it with Wilbur, but he'd left before they'd been able to [[explore the whole thing together. ->forest 2]] (set: $ending to it + 1)

When he got home, Garrett saw his father sitting at their kitchen table with his head in his hands. He didn't move when Garrett sat down. [[“Hey champ. I have some news,” he said. ->graf 2]]

The water is numbing cold. You look for the lifeboat that left but can't see much over the swells. You begin to paddle in a random direction, hoping you'll find it. Above you, the night sky is clear. There is a full moon, watching silently. Same as it's watched every other struggle [[humans have ever faced.->graf 6]] (set: $ending to it + 1) (set: $lyingfather to true)

You feel cold. Ice cold. It's so shocking you lose your breath for a minute. You picture the man's face—its resignation; its fear—and how it looked like a mask. You see the lights of the lifeboat in front of you. You yell, and then you [[begin swimming.->graf 6]] (set: $ending to it + 1) (set: $lyingfather to false)

<h3><i>05/15/20XX</i></h3> None of the bars were interested. Fuck. But! But!!!!! Chris put me in touch with one of their friends and he said I'd be perfect for a role at his company. They make SaaS bullshit but who cares. I need money. [[/I'll do whatever.->I'll do whatever.]]

Garrett figured he could explore another day. So he turned around and headed back the way he'd come—the forest would be there tomorrow. At home, he poked his head into his dad's office and said hello, then ran upstairs to log on. They were in the middle of a free survival crafting game when Garrett's dad interrupted them. “Gar, I need you to come downstairs right now.” “Can it wait?” “No it can't.” [[Garrett turned around to see his tears streaming down his father's face.->graf 2]] (set: $ending to it + 1) (set: $headhome to true)

The sun was starting to dip below the trees when Wilbur saw his phone ringing. It was his dad, probably wondering where he was. [[Hello?->Hello?]] (set: $ending to it + 1) (set: $headhome to false)

“Hey Gar, can you come home right now?” Garrett noticed his dad didn't sound quite right. Something was going on. [[“I'm almost back dad, I'll be there in 10 minutes.”->"I'm almost back dad, I'll be there in 10 minutes."]]

<h3><i>08/05/20XX</i></h3> i got the fucking job [[!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!->home drama]]

<h3><i>06/20/20XX</i></h3> Second interview down. I feel pretty good. They said they'd get back to me in a week, pending other candidate interviews. Whatever. I can wait. Chris and I had a talk. About everything. I couldn't bring myself to say it, though. I'm so, so grateful for them keeping a roof over my head. But even though we live together, it just hasn't felt right for a while. I keep wondering if I've made a mistake. Last night I dreamed we lived together in a beautiful castle somewhere in Scotland (ridiculous) but we weren't happy because it was filled with ghosts who kept bothering us. [[I woke up drenched in sweat.->I woke up drenched in sweat.]]

“The usual?” “Yes please, thank you.” She took a corner stool and watched as people filtered in. Nobody she recognized. She read articles on her phone and drank her white wine slowly enough that it was warm by the last sip. “Another?” [[That'd be great, thanks.->That'd be great, thanks.]] [[No, I should get going.->She swallowed her feelings and headed upstairs.]] (set: $ending to it + 1)

A glass of wine was waiting for her at their kitchen table. Chris was sitting their with their own glass, reading a book. Very obviously waiting for her. “Hey babe. I really need to talk to you about something.” Lucy sat down. “It's...” She drank half of her glass in one gulp. [[“Okay. Okay. What is it?”->graf 2]] (set: $ending to it + 1) (set: $anotherround to false)

Finally someone she knew from the neighborhood walked in. Well, not knew. Saw around her building. The kind of neighbor you nod to because you know you're in it together, even if you've never formally met. To her surprise, he introduced himself. “I see you everywhere—who are you? I'm David.” “Lucy. Nice to meet you too!” “I think we're below you guys—we're 14C.” [[And that's how it started.->graf 2]]

Lucy was feeling restless. She wanted to talk to someone. Not a therapist—she didn't have health insurance, and besides they hardly had office visits these days anyway—but just someone she didn't know who might have an unbiased opinion of her situation. “Another?” [[Sure.->Sure.]] (set: $ending to it + 1) (set: $anotherround to true)

It's barricaded from the outside. You look behind you and she's there, out of breath. You shake your head. She starts to sob. You both know this is it. You embrace as the world crumbles around you; you suddnely understand that class divides are less important than simple human touch when you're [[about to die.->graf 6]] (set: $ending to it + 1) (set: $survive to true)

You get there first. You can feel your muscles straining—lactic acid building and building all the while—as the door begins to open. She hesitates for a minute, makes eye contact with you, nods, and then rushes through. [[You let go, exhausted.->hall crumble]] (set: $ending to it + 1)

Your choice, of course, says something about who you are. Who you really are, in the silent private glow of your screen. It says something to me too—me, the game writer. The person who makes all of your choices for you. Oz, if he weren't a lost balloonist from Kansas. So I can say for certain: [[You're a romantic.->intro]] (set: $ending to 1) (set: $takeherhand to true)

hey man whats up! [[not much just in the forest trying to explore it finally->not much just in the forest trying to explore it finally]] (set: $ending to it + 1)

I think about choices for a living. Like this one: [[You take her hand.]] [[You leave her there with that hurt expression on her face, the one you've gotten to know far too well.]]

Garrett ate the ham sandwich his dad had made him, lost in thought. [[He decided to head home and hang out with Wilbur online.->He decided to head home and hang out with Wilbur online.]] [[He decided to keep exploring.]]

The few choices you made in the previous scenes drove the narrative action. I built the dioramas and sketched the players, but you breathed life into them. You animated them with your choices, gave them some life of your own—and, I like to think, made them numinous because you invested some of yourself, for a moment, [[in the choosing.->graf 3]]

As in life, your choices beget choices, in other words. And that in turn provokes immersion. Even if the options are prescribed, and not infinite. In 1997, the scholar Janet Murray published //Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace//, a startlingly prescient treatise on digital media; in it, Murray argued that computers could unlock a new dimension of narrative possibility. “Can we also imagine a cyberdrama that would develop beyond the pleasures of a compelling entertainment to attain the force and originality we associate with art?” she asked. I think from here we can answer yes. The field Murray recognized and described in its infancy has since flourished, and all sorts of evolved flora and fauna now abound. In real life, outside the game world’s magic circle, our choices are constrained by forces both within and beyond our ken. The circumstances of your birth are the first set of constraints; then there are health, wealth, and the physical and political limits imposed on us by our societies. When you arrive at adulthood, you experience a rapid increase in the number of choices you can make, while also understanding the constraints far better. I tend to think that to be an adult is to bear the consequences of your actions—to act with the knowledge that you might have to [[answer for your choices later. ->graf 4]]

This is one of the other reasons I think interactive narratives are seductive: they allow us to participate in the fantasy of a choice without consequences. For example, each game in the nearly thirty-year-old Grand Theft Auto franchise has a main storyline, but those narratives are often subordinated to the simpler pleasures of robbing a bank, or stealing a car, visiting brothels, or breaking and entering just for the hell of it, and doing all these things without any impact on the outcome of the game. This is the other type of interactive narrative, the kind that isn't explicitly written or imagined by a developer. As much as the GTA designers and writers wanted you to shoot people and rob banks, they didn't choose exactly how you'd do it. (Or, in fact, if you’d do it at all.) [[You did that yourself.->graf 5]]

I think of branching narratives as a kind of Aristotelian mimesis: it imitates the way our actions can be consequential, and raises that quotidian idea to the level of art. If I give you a choice—[[save the princess->save the princess]] or [[save yourself->save yourself]], maybe—I have to think all the way through those stories and [[what they imply.->graf 6]]

Borges’s map-loving empire tried to replace the art of cartography with an exact representation of reality, and it didn’t work. The descendants of the map-makers find their inheritance useless, and “delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters.” In the fiction of the story, tattered pieces of the map still exist “in the Deserts of the West . . . inhabited by Animals and Beggars.” But there is otherwise [[no record of the mapmaker's effort.->graf 8]]

As Aristotle had it in his Poetics, man is the great imitator. For him, it is the one thing that differentiates us from every other living thing. “Objects which in themselves we view with pain, we delight to contemplate when reproduced with minute fidelity: such as the forms of the most ignoble animals and of dead bodies,” he writes. What is interactive narrative but an imitation of the experience of life itself? Our choices are our lives. [[And they can be our art, too.->end]]

As the hall crumbles around you, you think about the sense of purpose you'd been chasing all your life. You think, maybe, you found it. There is peace, now. [[You allow yourself to rest.->graf 6]] (set: $survive to true)

Lucy took a deep breath in front of her apartment buildnig. Chris had been the one who encouraged her to find her new gig, and he'd supported her through an extended period of unemployment. She'd swallowed her real feelings by [[writing them down in her diary->writing them down in her diary]], but now, with the concrete promise of economic stability that the job represented, the problems in their relationship felt harder to ignore. Keys in hand, she paused. [[In an instant she'd decided to put her keys back in her pocket and walk to the closest bar.->In an instant she'd decided to put her keys back in her pocket and walk to the closest bar.]] [[She swallowed her feelings and headed upstairs.]] (set: $ending to it + 1)

But here I am addressing you directly, when I should probably be showing and not just telling. So, another choice: [[Lucy needed a drink. It had been a long first day at work. There had been all those introductions, and then the smiling, the newness, and the work itself—what was the point again? And now the long train home, to Chris, to more familiar discomforts.->home drama]] [[Garrett wanted to finish what he'd started in the forest. His father had packed him a solid lunch, after all, and he knew it wasn't that large. Even so, he felt a twinge of anxiety because this time he was exploring alone—without Wilbur.-> forest]]

without me 💀 [[💀]]

You're running through the great hall of her castle as it's collapsing into stone and dust behind you. You can see the entrance, those two huge doors—but you know they're locked. In the few seconds before you reach them, you remember that when you arrived it took two men to open these massive oak slabs. [[You speed up, passing her, and begin to wind the door open, knowing it might be your last act.->You speed up, passing her, and begin to wind the door open, knowing it might be your last act.]] [[You rush toward the guardhouse, hoping to find an exit there. If you don't, you're doomed.->You rush toward the guardhouse, hoping to find an exit there. If you don't, you're doomed.]] (set: $ending to it + 1)

You see the last life jacket, and you see him seeing it at the same time. You sprint. He doesn't. You get there first. [[“I... I'm a father,” you say, lying. “I have a young son at home!” You jump off the edge of the ferry and into the inky black.->"I... I'm a father," you say, lying. "I have a young son at home!" You jump off the edge of the ferry and into the inky black.]] [[“I... I'm sorry,” you say. There's nothing left to do but jump off the deck of the ferry.->"I... I'm sorry," you say. There's nothing left to do but jump off the deck of the ferry.]] (set: $ending to it + 1)

<h3><i>04/03/20XX</i></h3> I just don't know. I don't! I can't. The truth is I'm stuck. I can't even treat Chris to breakfast sandwiches anymore. I <i>need</i> a job. [[Any job.->Any job.]] Tomorrow I'm going to go around the neighborhood with my resume and see if the bartending I did in my 20s is good enough to land me something that pays. (set: $ending to it + 1)

gl man lets game when your back [[bet->forest 2]]

ur dad know? [[ya i just have to be back before mom gets home->ya i just have to be back before mom gets home]]

There’s a friction here, of course, between my desire to represent reality and my very human limits. Each possibility I’ve envisioned as an option for you to choose doubles or triples the writing. The word count inflates just like the map Borges introduced in “On Rigor in Science,” which describes an empire in pursuit of a cartographic work so exact it exists one to one with reality. When you attempt to reproduce all the choices one could make in any given situation—when you try and account for all the possibilities—you end up with the same [[complexity as real life.->graf 7]]

The many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics says that every choice you make splits the other choices off into their own non-interacting universes. The places where you made the opposite choice, or no choice at all. In some way it's all recorded: the choice to use this word or that one, to love her or leave her, to go left and not right. And there is no judgment from the universe. [[Just the slow expansion of possibility.->graf 9]]

In here, it means I’m writing for all of you: the ones who took her hand and the ones who left; the ones who chose Lucy and the ones who chose Garrett. It’s like writing for a chorus. The altos have their distinct lines, ones that differ from the sopranos and the tenors. Together they harmonize. The part you choose to sing is your own, dictated by the specific set of circumstances that made you who you are at the specific moment of your choosing. I won’t assign you a part. [[You can do that yourself.->graf xx]]

One thing that I think is unique to writing multiple possibilities—letting the reader choose her own adventure—is the way it forces you to contend with outcomes. In a short story, for example, your path is chosen for you, and the way you arrive at the end is prescribed. That, obviously, is not the case when you're writing these other universes into existence. But what I think is more salient is the idea that each path you can take to the ending is equally legitimate. There's a concept within games about this, about "good endings" and bad ones — but no part of it acknowledges legitimate or illegitmate ones. [[Each outcome is equal. The story you chose is the story the author intended.

(if: $ending < 5)[(go-to: "credits 1")] (if: $ending > 5 and < 8 )[(go-to: "credits 2")] (if: $ending > 8 and < 12)[(go-to: "credits 3")] (if: $trueending is true or $ending > 13)[(go-to: "credits 4")]

Written and programmed by <a href="https://bijanstephen.blog"; target="_blank">Bijan Stephen</a>. Edited by Yuka Igarashi. Thanks for playing! [[Epilogue->epilogue?]]

Written and programmed by <a href="https://bijanstephen.blog"; target="_blank">Bijan Stephen</a>. Edited by Yuka Igarashi. Thanks for playing! And thanks for making a few choices. [[Epilogue->epilogue?]]

Written and programmed by <a href="https://bijanstephen.blog"; target="_blank">Bijan Stephen</a>. Edited by Yuka Igarashi. Thanks for playing! And truly, thank you for making so many choices. [[Epilogue->epilogue?]]

Written and programmed by <a href="https://bijanstephen.blog"; target="_blank">Bijan Stephen</a>. Edited by Yuka Igarashi. Thanks for playing! I know I said that every path is legitimate in the essay, but this is the most legitimate one. You've 100%'d the essay, you absolute gamer. You made (print: $ending) choices. [[Epilogue->epilogue?]]

Just because you were curious, I'll tell you what happened to everyone. (if: $takeherhand is true)[(print: "You took her hand! She dumps you anyway.")] (if: $takeherhand is false)[(print: "You left her. You aren't any happier, unfortunately.")] (if: $headhome is true)[(print: "It was the first time Garrett had seen his father cry in front of him, he realized. He noticed his mother wasn't home yet either. The sunset was beautiful, Garrett thought, and even then he knew his life was about to change.")] (if: $headhome is false)[(print: "Garrett's dad looked up, finally, and his face was shining with tears. But he was smiling, too. Garrett noticed a letter in front of him with a letterhead from the U.S. Patent Office. Something good was going to happen, he thought. Something wonderful.")] (if: $anotherround is true)[(print: "They ran into each other enough at the bar that they decided to make it a habit. That kept Lucy sane through her breakup—a long time coming, she had come to realize—and it was a reliable emotional release valve for David, too. They got along. Maybe too well. When they finally got together, some years later, they decided to leave the city.")] (if: $anotherround is false)[(print: "It wasn't a surprise to Lucy. What was surprising was how devastating it felt; things had been better lately, and she had started to hope again. In the end, it was her breakup with Chris that finally got Lucy out of the city. It never suited her, and they helped her realize it.")] (if: $survive is true)[(print: "You wake up in a bed. Everything hurts. Someone spoon feeds you water. You resolve to leave princesses alone for the rest of your natural life.")] (if: $lyingfather is true)[(print: "Your shouts eventually attract the attention of the lifeboat. They pick you up, half-dead with cold. Everyone looks shellshocked. You have nightmares for the rest of your life about the ship sinking, and you develop an intense fear of water. When you dream—which is often—you always return to the man's face, the one you left behind. Eventually you look him up. Every year on the anniversary of the accident, you send his children flowers anonymously. It does not soothe you.")] (if: $lyingfather is false)[(print: "The rest of your life is mercifully short. You eventually run out of energy to swim; you float along, looking at the sky, praying for a rescue. You're picked up a day later, half-mad with dehydration. The man you left behind haunts you enough to send you to an early grave, by your own hand.")] (set: $trueending to true) [[Play again?->begin]]

Your choice, of course, says something about who you are. Who you really are, in the silent private glow of your screen. It says something to me too—me, the game writer. The person who makes all of your choices for you. Oz, if he weren't a lost balloonist from Kansas. So I can say for certain: [[You're pragmatic.->intro]] (set: $ending to 1) (set: $takeherhand to false)