Monday Music #4 (Fever Ray, Cecilia Nordlund)

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Today's artists have a few things in common:

- They're from Sweden, and
- I had no idea of their existence before a few days ago

Well, sort of. Cecilia Nordlund has a few six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon-except-in-music-and-without-Kevin-Bacon connections to Swedish singer-songwriter Katharina Nuttall, who I do know about, and Fever Ray is one half of The Knife. Karin Andersson, to be exact, who apparently released a solo album for download (the physical version appears in a few months).

Musically, Fever Ray isn't all that much of a departure from her old group. Some have described her work as The Knife with the party music (well, as much as they ever had) leeched out, but it's more than that. It's the music that plays after the machines have pureed all the parties into pulp. On the lead single, "If I Had A Heart," low strings mutter across the landscape and voices circle them, trying to regain the life they usurped. "If I had a voice, I could sing," one laments,

Listen here.

Distinctive as her vocals are, Karin Andersson isn't the only vocalist on the album. On one track, fellow Swedish singer-songwriter Cecilia Nordlund guests. Turns out she's equally amazing. She's been in several different groups, but my favorite is the Monkeystrikes (named because, in Cecilia's words, listening to their music makes you feel like you've been slapped in the face by a monkey). For a reference, imagine Carina Round's _Slow Motion Addict_ without any involvement by Glen Ballard, and you'll be almost there.

Everything on their page is great, but "Serial Faller in Lover" is especially so. At the beginning, it sounds like a sweet love song, all jangly guitars and sunshine. Cecilia's spiky vocals on the verses, however, suggest that more is going on, and then you realize that she's singing lyrics like "If you reject my love, I'll put a hole in your brain, shoot off a leg, perhaps make you blind." The "serial" in the title is no accident; this isn't a love song after all, but one of sociopathic obsession - but then, how often does the media make that distinction? And it sounds great, doesn't it?

You can find the album from various venues to download (legally), and I've found one Swedish site that carries it.

Listen here.

Monkeystrikes has, unfortunately, disbanded; their official site is more or less a 404. Not to worry, though - Cecilia Nordlund's releasing a solo album under the name Cilihili. The song (and its remix) on her Myspace has to be one of the most compelling rock songs and/or dance remixes about porn-induced computer viruses.

(Extra points, too, for the picture of her peeking out from the center of a sunflower.)

Listen here.

Basic Real Time is launched!

Behold!

This is version 1. If using this extension causes your story, game, or unspecified-term-IF-work to explode, please let me know so I can fix it. (If it causes physical matter to explode, I didn't do it and I plead the 5th.) Or if there's a way you think I can improve it that doesn't involve explosion prevention, let me know and I'll see what I can do.

Monday Music #3: Rose Berlin, Unwoman

Three weeks in and I am already starting to doubt the sustainability of this enterprise. My pet theory, which has about twenty logical holes waiting for the poking, is that January in music is like January in movies. Wrong in so many ways, but it makes a good rationalization.

It so happens, though, that I also have a habit of staying up until obscene hours. The timestamp on that last entry is wrong. It says 12:27 AM, but it's really, er, five hours later. This is unfortunate for my body chemistry but fortunate for discovering things to write about the day after.

It wasn't that I procrastinated on purpose. I spent quite a bit of time seeking out new music to write about. The problem was that I didn't love most of it enough to write about, or I loved something that wasn't new to me. This is a resolution, after all, and I'd like to at least pay lip service to staying in its parameters.

Turns out I was approaching it the wrong way. Going out purposefully trying to find music has never really worked for me. Most of it comes to me, whether it's from mailing list posts or Google News items or, in a few cases, totally unexpected discoveries when I'm poking around looking other things up. And so it is with these artists.

Now let's have at it!

Rose Berlin, "You and I Forever" - I wound up on her MySpace page at about 4:30 AM (as I said...) while doing some Coraline research. Some people I know really dislike tribute albums, but I never understood that. Already you have a built-in entry point - artists who like what you like! And as far as unexpected connnections go, she apparently shares a PR representative with Thea Gilmore.

Forget these details and you might be a bit skeptical about her page. The truth is, though, it just looks like something a 16-year-old made, which it is. Fight this skepticism. The music is great. I had trouble deciding which song to write about (the guitars alone on "Take It Off" make it a contender for me), but decided on "You and I Forever," which is a wonderful breezy bit of power-pop which I've been listening to, on and off, the entire day and have yet to become sick of. Color me very, very impressed.

No CD that I could find, but the song's available in its entirety here:

Listen here.

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Unwoman - Caught Her: This week I also sent out a desperate plea to Ecto asking for CD Baby recommendations. Boy, did I get recommendations. Dozens of them. My wallet is cringing in the corner and my wish list is even more bloated than before.

Now then. Pretty much everything Unwoman (real name: Erica Mulkey) has done has been on my CD Baby wish list for some time. Or so I thought. It turns out that I never really delved into it much, because she has a lot more albums than I remembered. One from last year, even! But that's not the one this is about.

Her recording name, of course, is from Margaret Atwood. That's not the only unexpected (well, in this case, it's a bit telegraphed) connection, though. "Caught Her" is from her 2007 album Blossoms, which adds to the equation cellos (Mulkey is a cellist) and Edna St. Vincent Millay (the second half of the album is settings of her poems.) Again, it was difficult to choose, but I settled on "Three Songs Of Shattering," from said second half. It's everything a poem setting should be. A lot of settings can be bland, but Mulkey's interpretation of the words is spot on and the solo cello instrumentation is dynamic enough to fill in the gaps.

The full song's available on her site and a clip is here: Listen here.

January 19, 2008: Wishes, books, pastimes, and trivia

My birthday was Saturday! Cue a large Amazon purchase, as detailed below:

Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, soundtrack and DVD - I love everything about this, especially since I'm finally over the fact that it made me feel like I'd been sucker punched. It also made me a Joss Whedon fan, as you'll see in a few other items on the list. It's also extremely quotable. I am still attempting to push this onto my friends. They had a lot more luck with a few entries farther down.

Coraline - I have this odd habit (based on two events, so perhaps it's only the beginnings of one) of only reading things Neil Gaiman wrote after finding out there's a movie. The corollary to this is only reading the things that were made into movies. It happened with Stardust and now this. Of course, I tend to really like the movies. There's this one scene in the film version of Stardust of Yvaine walking - any more details would be a spoiler, but it's about 2/3 through - and it's gorgeous, iconic, and adjective-inspiring.

I didn't have to be a film-induced fan. It'd make sense if I wasn't. I could have gone by the Tori Amos connection. Or that it'd help to be more familiar with his work since I follow him on Twitter. (Tangent: There is no way to talk about Twitter following that does not sound creepy and stalky.) I didn't know there was a movie until after I got it into my mind to purchase this. Oh well. I'm a film-induced fan, I guess. At least I can read the book first.

The other thing about this is that the plot, from what I've read, seems to fall squarely into the "child discovers magical world" theme. I love almost anything like that. I carved a secret passage into a hedge at my old house because of this. (It was beautiful, too. I may have written about it, but you headed in through an ivy patch, past a lot of dried-up thorny vine sticks which I hacked through, and into the part with all these white flowers where the sun broke through.) From what else I've read, it supposedly subverts this. I will soon find out how.

How Not To Write A Novel - I don't even know why I need this book. I am phenomenally succeeding at not writing a novel. Supposedly it is amusing, though. Everyone enjoys being amused.

Firefly and Serenity - Sure, I'm a fan now. It doesn't help my standing with my friends that I tend to like and dislike the opposite characters as them, though.

Repo! The Genetic Opera soundtrack - This is strange. I hate horror movies, for the most part. I hate gore for its own sake and the whole self-feeding nature of the genre, and I never saw the point in watching things like this ironically. So a while back, when it was first announced that Sarah Brightman was going to be in this, I was a bit taken aback at how excited I was at the prospect. Fast forward to a few weeks ago, when I mentioned it offhand and showed my friends the trailer.

Fast forward to now, when we watched it. This is one of the worst movies I have ever seen (the worst was Angelina Jolie's Tomb Raider, for the record) and yet I like it. The gore does nothing for me. Neither does Paris Hilton's presence. The music, though, is great. Hence my purchase of the soundtrack (the film, er, might be impending.)

Goblin Market soundtrack - Yes. Soundtrack. There was a musical. An Off-Broadway adaptation with music by Polly Pen. In layman's terms: Christina Rossetti with sopranos! How can it be more perfect? I don't know. It will definitely get reviewed.

The 10th Kingdom - All I really know about this is the amount of Wikipedia blurbing I could stand before I thought I'd be getting horribly spoiled. So not much. I do know, however, that Miriam Stockley sang one of the songs on the soundtrack. "Wishing on a Star." Not many people can make a Rose Royce cover sound this otherworldly. (The Cover Girls version, incidentally, isn't bad, but it's completely different.) If this is anything like its soundtrack, it is already amazing. Besides, I tend to like fantasy-ish works like this.

Claire Clairmont and the Shelleys - Finally bought this; it was warming my wish list for quite some time. It was either this or the letters, but I figure biographies are better to start with than letters. Incidentally, I suspect that at least part of the reason why I'm fascinated by her is her name.

The Swan Princess - I watched this when I was a child, loved it, then rediscovered it last year. I don't even remember what reminded me of it. Anyway, despite my loathing for their marketing, and my awareness of all their questionable aspects, I still like Disney-style movies. This one isn't by Disney, but it has all the same elements. Lovely songs, some truly beautiful scenes, most taking place on the lake, comic relief. I love what I love. That is all.

Assorted books. The Changeling by Joy Williams, Ibid by Mark Dunn, Little, Big by John Crowley, and some books by Max Barry. I don't really remember the reasoning behind some of them, but they were on my wish list and books are easy additions, being inexpensive.

Rapture by Carol Ann Duffy - I can take or leave modern poets. I don't like Billy Collins, for instance, because everything I've read of him reminds me in a negative way of the sort of stand-up comics whose routines consist mainly of pointing out everyday occurrences in a minimally funny manner. "Have you ever noticed that red lights always take forever? What's up with that?"

I love Carol Ann Duffy, though. I was torn between this, which I've already read, and Mean Time, which I haven't, but this won out. The poems here are lyrical, haunting, and sometimes just skirt the edge of cliche, but I haven't read any major objections (in fact, I was introduced to her on one of the forums which takes a hardline stance on that sort of thing) so I don't feel bad. Even if I had, I wouldn't. The book is gorgeous. I don't know if the one I ordered will live up to the library book I checked out (and, er, still need to return, now that I think about it). It had a red cover with gold writing and just looking at it was like looking at something timeless. Not so much a book as a monument. I almost want to keep it.

Camille - Le Fil and Juliana Hatfield - How To Walk Away - I mentioned the Juliana Hatfield. I'm also really looking forward to listening to this by Camille. She has a newer album out, but this is the one that grabbed me because there's so much crazy and wonderful vocal stuff going on. It's a cappella music (it might not be strictly a cappella, I haven't listened to it in its entirety yet) for people who like things other than Sweet Caroline covers.

And even after this, I have things on my wish list. I will live someplace with lots of bookshelves. I'll be Rapunzel in a media tower.

~*~*~

A lot of people I know are doing the 50 Book Challenge. I figure I'd join the festivities! My only criteria here:

1. Nothing I read for class. This is arbitrary, I know, but I was going to be reading them anyway.
2. Nothing I've already read. No comments necessary.
3. No children's picture books. That's just silly.

This counts, however: Non-fiction, young adult books, children's chapter books, plays, short story collections, graphic novels, and anything else that I get the idea into my mind to read.

So we have, so far:

John Green - An Abundance of Katherines: I was recommended this as a reasonably intelligent YA book. As I read it, all I could think of was how much the author really wanted this to be made into a Judd Apatow movie. You could replace Hassan with Seth Rogen and have the same book. I despise Judd Apatow. There are worse things you could read, though, and any book that tosses in amusing footnotes is all right with me.

Tom Perrotta - The Abstinence Teacher: I'm a fan of his, and the book didn't disappoint, even if the character 180 about a third of the way through was a bit too noticeable. (This isn't reading into it. In the material at the back, or in an interview - I forget which - Perrotta pretty much came out and said that Tim's character did a 180.)

M. T. Anderson - Feed: Another YA book. I enjoyed this one quite a bit, though. I like dystopias (IN FICTION. In FICTION. Not in real life.) and this was pretty well done. A lot more lyricism than you sometimes get in YA. My only quibble is that Violet falls a bit too neatly into the Stargirl (tangent: there's a sequel to this? I'm almost afraid to read it.) manic pixie dream girl mold, but their relationship isn't the point, so it isn't as irritating.

3/50.

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I've been playing Scrabble on ISC a lot lately. People on ifMUD linked it to me, and I have to say, it's the best Scrabble site I've found on the Internet, mainly because it has the benefit of being actual Scrabble and not the terrible approximation that is Yahoo! Literati.

The problem is that I am a lot worse at Scrabble than I thought. I've picked up some things. Scrabble with QI, ZA, and XU is a lot different than Scrabble without. You want to play more like a New York Times crossword than an elementary school crossword, generally (i.e. parallel is often better than perpendicular.) Nevertheless, my ranking lags behind everyone else I know who is playing it. Clearly I should recruit some people who are worse than me.

~*~*~

Trivia:

- The bell tower in Chapel Hill looks remarkably like a very large full moon if you're looking at it through the trees. It startled me at first.

- In Carrboro today I saw some violets which were near-frozen. All colors, too. It startled me, to be honest, that they were just alive. How are they alive? It's cold here for North Carolina!

- If I ever need to laugh, I go onto YouTube and watch Mario romhack videos. You probably look skeptical, but the good ones are among the most fun things on the site (also fun: the Pachelbel Rant.) If you're familiar with the source material, which you are, and if you like schadenfreude, which you might, it'll work for you.

January 12, 2009: Monday Music #2!

Yes! It's that time of the week again. Last week I featured songs that were somewhat similar. This week, I'll do the opposite. I love both of these songs but they're nothing like each other.

First up is Dressy Bessy - "Ten Million Stars", from their 2008 album "Hollerandstomp" (haven't heard the whole album yet, so it wasn't in the running for my best-of) Dressy Bessy is pretty popular with a lot of Throwing Muses and Tanya Donelly fans, and it's easy to see why. Musically, they're a bit like you'd think Throwing Muses might sound if you extrapolated out from The Real Ramona. The songs are still angular, and lead vocalist Tammy Ealom sounds a bit like early-era Kristin Hersh, but as you'd guess from the album title, the song's pretty much made for energy and joy. And what joy it is! Damn catchy and something I really wish I had looked into last year.

Listen here.

Second song: Polly Scattergood - "I Hate The Way". Polly Scattergood's music could not be any more different than Dressy Bessy's. Of course, critics have compared her to Kate Bush and PJ Harvey. (I should just key that sentence into a macro. CTRL-SHIFT-ARGHNOTAGAIN. I'm seriously considering buying a panic button just for this.) These are not the right comparisons. Their musical style is, for the most part, extroverted. Expressive voices, big arrangements, everything expansive, directed outward.

Polly Scattergood directs everything inward. I mean, just listen to her voice: pure, a bit studied, a lot tentative, like ice you think might shatter if you pay attention to it for too long. Nicola Hitchcock from Mandalay has a voice like this, and Sarah Brightman when she's not singing classically, and the ur-example, Stina Nordenstam. Her music is the same way: cocoonlike, built for one, and reticent to the point where you almost feel like you're intruding just listening to it, until you realize that yes, it may be a cocoon, but she's made room in there for one more person.

The beginning of "I Hate The Way" is the spookiest thing put to record in a long, long time. This is not hyperbole. It isn't a cappella, exactly. There's a faint sustained note, a few footsteps of a drumbeat, but Polly whisper-sings like she's in another room altogether, hiding, and with good reason; every sound that isn't her voice is something trying to claw its way in. It's chilling.

By the second verse things pick up: you get your chord progression, and the background tracks sound like background tracks, Polly's singing picks up force, and the song becomes, more or less, a song. And then there's - a big chorus? What? Not only that, but a big major-key chorus that, if it was plucked out and put into another song, wouldn't sound out of place on the radio? It's deliberate, though. "My doctor said I'm going to sing a happy tune, but my body gave up too soon." Polly says. The bombast is that frantic attempt to do this, but, as the lyrics suggest, the guitars and chords eventually peter out into silence. The song's perfectly crafted, and I'm really eager to see what other craftswork is going to be on her upcoming debut.

Listen here.

In defense of the Actor Stance

Recently, Victor Gijsbers (The Baron, etc.) posted "Actor stance, make way!", an essay criticizing his perceived ubiquity of the "actor stance" in interactive fiction. Some context: Figaro, as the title implies, is a demo work based on The Marriage of Figaro. The main feature of Figaro is its approach to decision-making. You play Figaro, hiding in a trunk and spying on Susanna and a mysterious man. Who is this man? That's for the player to decide - literally; the game outright asks the player to choose one of three options. Once he (or she!) has been identified, Figaro can - well, he can do one of three things, depending on whether he's got an axe, a camera, or a cream pie. Again, the player chooses.

This setup is an example of the "author stance." The terms "Actor stance" and "Author stance" (and "Director stance," which isn't really discussed much in Gijsbers' post) are defined in detail at this link:

In Actor stance, a person determines a character's decisions and actions using only knowledge and perceptions that the character would have.

In Author stance, a person determines a character's decisions and actions based on the real person's priorities, then retroactively "motivates" the character to perform them. (Without that second, retroactive step, this is fairly called Pawn stance.)

Gijsbers argues, in essence, that part of progress in interactive fiction is moving away from the Actor stance, where he claims it is currently, to the Author stance. I think progress can be made equally well moving toward it.

I admit that I do not have experience with RPGs, so I will not discuss that analogy in much depth. Instead, I see IF as more akin to static fiction. If we're invoking the old story/game dichotomy, I lean heavily toward story and believe it better suits the Actor stance. There's plenty of support for this in the actor/author/director model. Also from the link:

Consider the previous example of a group who has arrived at the agreement to role-play a vampire-character game...what sort of Stances might be most common during play, from each of them?

...

Another is interested in experiencing and Exploring [sic] the nuances of the story as it is presented from an external source (perhaps a sourcebook and/or a GM), and spends a lot of time in Actor Stance.

There are no sourcebooks or GMs in interactive fiction, of course, but this approach still works. The player, in his or her interactions with a work of IF, draws out various nuances of the story by making the PC do things. In the process, he or she becomes immersed in the work. Immersion, too, is discussed:

Immersion is another difficult issue that often arises in Stance discussions. Like "realism" and "completeness" and several other terms, it has many different definitions in role-playing culture. The most substantive definition that I have seen is that immersion is the sense of being "possessed" by the character. This phenomenon is not a stance, but a feeling. What kind of role-playing goes with that feeling? The feeling is associated with decision-making that is incompatible with Director or Author stance. Therefore, I suggest that immersion (an internal sensation) is at least highly associated with Actor Stance.

So this is the great advantage of Actor stance: facilitating immersion. Before I go any further, I'd like to clarify a few related terms. In his essay "A Triangle of Identities," part of the DM4, Graham Nelson identifies three main identities at work in interactive fiction: the player, the protagonist (or PC), and the narrator. The player is the actual person reading the work of IF, the protagonist is the character depicted in the story, and the narrator is the voice relaying that protagonist's thoughts. The protagonist and the narrator are functionally identical to their counterparts in static fiction; the player, however, has a greatly expanded role. I'd like to add a fourth identity to this: the parser. Not the parser as in the actual source code that processes commands, but the parser as in the voice that tells you when you've entered something invalid.

What I propose is a way of writing and reading IF that's rooted in the Actor model, where the player temporarily inhabits the mind of the PC. One common representation of the Actor model is the player asking him/herself "What would (PC) do?" but this isn't quite accurate. It still interposes a barrier between the actor and the PC. People don't go around, after all, asking themselves what they'd do. They come up with ideas, and then do things. I'm sitting down right now, but I could at any moment get the urge to jump, or go into a jig, or break a window or run out of the building screaming. In the Actor model, the player provides these urges. The protagonist either does them and reports back, or rejects them, providing his or her reasoning.

To return to Graham Nelson's roles, this model conflates the protagonist and the narrator. In static fiction, this is roughly analogous to the first person point of view. The narrator *is* the PC - maybe not the "main character," but the one telling it. There's one big difference here, of course: the text (usually) isn't first person, but second. This facilitates immersion - the player, being addressed, is brought into the work. Any printed text, then, is communication from the PC to the player.

Some existing works of IF are particularly conducive to this model. Stephen Bond's Rameses, for one, is particularly illustrative. (Spoilers ahead, for those unfamiliar.)

The player, in Rameses, is a voice in Alex's head, who suggests various actions he could take or words he could say. Alex, however, no matter how much he might want to comply, usually doesn't. He's too timid, or cowardly, or self-absorbed. The story unfolds unnervingly, as the player desperately tries to do something - anything! - to break Alex out of his shell. Some people have criticized Rameses as being uninteractive, or too much like static fiction. These people, in my opinion, are completely missing the point. This could be done in static fiction, technically, but it wouldn't be nearly as effective. It's one thing to write about how Alex is trapped inside his head, and quite another to have the player re-enact it.

Gijsbers seems to argue that it's dangerous to conflate the player and a fictional character in this way, bringing up Adam Cadre's Varicella. I disagree with this. There are plenty of completely depraved protagonists out there in film, fiction, theatre, and other media, and players identify with them all the time without becoming depraved themselves. If I read Hamlet and decide to identify with Hamlet, to closely follow what he does, that doesn't mean I'm going to put down the book and go murder the whole town. Ditto Macbeth (Shakespeare does this a lot). If I watch Sweeney Todd and start to root for Sweeney, I'm not going to get up after curtain and start my own barber shop. I'm not alone. As Gijsbers writes, most people can dissociate themselves from a fictional character. Immersion is what happens when they decide not to for a while. It may be disturbing to identify with an unsavory protagonist, and good works will embrace that.

To actually achieve immersion requires a good deal of implementation. Underimplementation kills, as reviewers point out all the time. Not only does the work have to be well-implemented, but the PC's voice must be strong. Anything that the work prints out has to be a plausible thought of the PC. If an action is trapped, there has to be believable reasoning behind it. (On a side note, this is one of the things I really like about Inform 7. Compared to I6, text substitutions are a whole lot less tedious, which makes it a lot easier to vary the text. After all, people don't repeat the same thoughts.)

It becomes even more important to make puzzles believable. It's bad enough to have soup cans without having to come up with a reason why the PC should care about them. Knowledge puzzles are the real threat. The player, after all, has thoughts of his or her own, and these thoughts might just be channeled into figuring something out before the PC does. This is why knowledge puzzles are so difficult.

A good deal of development, in the actor model, is devoted to getting rid of the parser voice. In an ideal playthrough, this voice would never appear; however, people make typos and use unsupported vocabulary and do all kinds of things the author didn't think of. So the parser intervenes with predefined messages. Most of them are fine responses - Graham Nelson and Mike Roberts are no slouches - but the PC most likely isn't either of them. The voice intervenes, then, and it's either someone completely unrelated, or a conduit for error messages. This is not good for immersion, and is a factor in many common IF problems. Guess-the-verb, for example, is frustrating in part because the parser has totally taken over. The player wants to get back to the PC, but can't. And again, underimplementation kills, because there are all these default parser messages where there should be PC communication. Fortunately, both Inform and TADS make it easy to change them.

A concern that can arise out of the actor model: If the work of IF represents a player's thoughts, why does the PC's mind work like a command prompt? There are two ways to approach this. The first is more of a joke that can only be done once or twice - maybe the PC literally DOES think like a parser! For most works, though, it's something the player has to accept, like the fact that the PC moves in compass directions. This requires suspension of disbelief, yes, but it really isn't all that much worse, on paper, than wondering why a novel's protagonist never mentions all the times she uses the restroom or has a snack, or why she inserts chapter breaks after suspenseful things happen, or why everybody she knows is portrayed by a celebrity, or why she breaks into song (if she's in a musical). It's less familiar, is all.

Another issue, as Gijsbers correctly points out, is out-of-character actions. As examples of these, he mentions saving, checking the score, and undoing. I'd extend that to meta-commands in general - and there are more of them than you might think. "Look," for example, might as well be a meta-command for "print a room description," since that's almost always how it's used. These too can jar the player out of immersion, but messing with them is a bit more problematic. You're not likely to make many friends, for instance, by disabling UNDO. There are a number of ways to get around this: disable them, make them actual commands somehow, preserve them as meta-commands but have the PC report them, or ignore them altogether, among others.

---

The above is the standard actor model, but it can be twisted a bit. An example can be seen as recently as Violet by Jeremy Freese, the winner of 2008's IFcomp. Violet generally follows this model, with one major change: the narrative voice isn't the PC's own voice. It's the PC imagining what his girlfriend would say. Everything is written in her voice, down to the meta-commands, and it works wonderfully. Also from 2008, the third place winner, Jim Munroe's Everybody Dies, uses several distinct personas in one head.

These are just two examples. Authors could come up with plenty of other variations on the model. You don't have to change it, though. Immersion is good on its own, and I'm excited to think about all the things that can be done by following this model.

---

Returning to Figaro for a second, I see no reason why this could not be done equally effectively with the actor stance. (Not to say that Figaro is bad. It isn't, at all. I quite liked it. This is just an exercise.) This requires a few assumptions:

1. People jump to conclusions based on faulty data. A lot. All the time. (Especially in theatre.)
2. People cannot always gather sufficient data.
3. People especially can't gather sufficient data when they're hiding in a chest.

So the intro would get into Figaro's voice, somewhat like what it does now. After a while, a mysterious man shows up. Assuming we're in the actor stance, it makes total sense for a person to examine the man. It'd take unconventional rationalization for someone not to. Even if that wasn't the case, the author designating the man as "mysterious" is pretty much commanding the player to examine him.

Let's be clear about what that means, though. In the author stance, "examine man" might as well be a meta-game command, roughly equivalent to "Give me some information about this man, parser." In the actor stance, "examine" means "examine." Here, it means that the PC is literally taking a close look at the man:

"Through the keyhole, you can't see much - just Susanna and some mysterious figure. A man?

>examine man

You strain through the keyhole, but it's so hard to focus on everything at once."

This is where the break happens. In Gijsbers' example, the player decides outright who this man is going to be, catalog-like. Keeping Figaro in the Actor stance believably would require the author to provide some way for the character to figure out who the man is. Let's say that the Count has a big ol' scar on his right cheek, and that Cherubino's got a paunchy belly, like a cute little adulterous Cupid. It sounds contrived, but people rely on signifiers like this all the time. How many times, for example, have you totally failed to recognize somebody because they got a haircut?

This information, of course, would go into the intro. In character, of course - you wouldn't just say "Oh, and by the way, the Count has a scar on his cheek and Cherubino has a paunchy belly." For the record. You'd instead have Figaro fuming about the miserably Count with his ugly scarred face - and that potbellied Cherubino is no better, the bastard! The key thing here is that this is a magician's choice. In other words, if you examine said body part, it's going to be scarred or bellied. (The game could prompt this by providing increasingly lurid but misinterpretable details of the two carrying on.) This version of Figaro, whether he likes it or not, has a vested interest in identifying an adulterer. Everything he sees is evidence to him. A man with a paunch? It's got to be Cherubino! The ONLY possible explanation. Example, again:

">x torso

You peer through the keyhole again, squatting a bit until the man's torso comes into view. It's paunchy. Too paunchy. Cherubino. The wretch!"

This, of course, would change the man's name from "mysterious man" to "Cherubino," and alter all the associated descriptions. Now for that inventory issue. This is a bit more difficult. You'd have to slip the three options - kill, photograph, or be-pie - into the intro, come up for plausible reasons why the PC can't do other things, and account for as many synonyms as possible. Then, whatever the player chooses determines what the character's carrying. If Figaro's going to kill them, he finds he's got a knife hidden in his clothes! (It'd be hard to hide an axe.) You'd have to deal with >inventory by turning it into a non-meta command. That is, changing it from "print my inventory" to "fumble around in my pockets to see what I've got" - only it fails. So, an example:

">i

You fumble around in your pockets, but can't find anything on a quick once-over. Maybe if you tried to find something in particular...

>kill cherubino

"YOU'RE GONNA PAY FOR THIS, WRETCH!" you roar, instinctively grabbing for that one fold of your robe, pulling out your knife, and doing the deed."

There's one big difference between this example and Gijsbers' game, of course. In Gijsbers' Figaro, your decision is pretty much the word of God. If you say the mysterious man is the Count, he is the Count. In here, your decision simply represents who the character thinks the man is. You can look at his torso, see his belly, and come to the conclusion that it's Cherubino - but maybe it isn't. It's just a paunch! Maybe the Duke from Rigoletto stopped by or something. Or Santa Claus. The possibilities are endless, but they don't really matter - for the story's purposes, what matters is the impression the character gets. Is it prone to lawnmowering? Yes, but no more than the original.

I'm not trying to say, either, that this version is any more valid. That'd be incredibly rude. It's just an exercise, again.

---

Is the Actor model the only one through which to approach interactive fiction? Of course not. This does not mean, however, that it should be discarded, or that it's somehow not conducive to innovation. Many, many fine games have incorporated aspects of this model, and I think there's plenty of room for progress in going further. There's room for more than one kind of IF, after all. If the actor model needs to move aside, it's only to let others stand by it.

January 5, 2009: Monday Music #1

For 2009, I'm starting a new feature. Monday Music. Every Monday, I'll highlight a song or two that I enjoyed. I don't comment on individual songs nearly enough, nor do other people.

Today's songs:

Sophie Zeyl - Two Apples. This is also from _Two Ways Of Running_ and is an excellent example of how to make a song build. It has menace and mystery and force from the first notes. I mentioned how "You Could Have Run Away" combines acoustic and electric elements well, and this one's possibly better. In the beginning, synths and violins dart around in the background, making room for lyrics and then giving way to a crash of an ending. Now if only I can find a physical copy of the album somewhere.

Listen here.

Sarah Fimm - Afraid. Musically, this is along the same lines - electronic, for the most part - but thematically, this has more in common with "Big Stripey Lie" by Kate Bush (yes, yes, I know). It's a song of devotion as grim determination, and the music falls perfectly into place along these lines, bleak and beautiful: the plodding intro, the slight but still perceptible build in the choruses, the fluttering strings at the end.

The song's from her EP White Birds, which is available as an online download here:

Listen here.