Making adventures

I am having a lot of fun these days writing two choose-your-own-adventure games. You may remember print-based adventure books from years ago: at the bottom of a scene there would be a statement like:

If you attack the monster with the marshmallow gun, go to page 28.

If you jump into the laundry chute, go to page 40.

Here in modern times we can get rid of the "print-based" bit and make these games so people can play them on their phones or other devices. All the sound effects and most of the glitzy colors happen in your head, of course--just like when you're reading a novel or a poem. But it sure is faster to create than trying to make a game with satisfactory graphics and a user interface that pleases (collision detection, anyone?).

Fortunately, Choice of Games has put together a simple coding language called ChoiceScript that lets you concentrate on building the story without spending a soul-killing amount of time constructing if-statements and tracking variables. Choice of Games publishes a ton of games through the various app stores, and also hosts games civilians like me create.

One of the two games I'm writing takes place in modern times, in the world of software startups. There's deadlines, duplicity, dodgy behavior, and lots of other things that don't start with "d".

The second game takes place around 1800 with the British Army in Nova Scotia. I wrote the first draft of this game for a contest last year (write a game in a month), and finished second in a field that had more than two entrants. This game is sprouting all sorts of new story lines as I try to enrich it and make it more fun for the reader/player.

I'll write more about these games in future posts. To end for now, I wanted to show a bit of how you write a scene, and how the reader sees it.

You write using a text editor (I use EditPad Pro). ChoiceScript has strict rules for how you write commands, and indenting is very important, so your scene starts to look like this:

What the player sees is more like this:

Curious to find out what happens between you and the Prince? So am I!

Tiny tenterhooks

At the end of the summer I had the chance to take the ferry across the Bay of Fundy to Saint John, New Brunswick, for a weekend playwriting workshop called "Script Happens". The Saint John Theatre Company put on the event, and a gentler, more welcoming bunch of theatre folks I have not met.

The theatre had Stephen Massicotte, the author of Mary's Wedding and many other plays, as dramaturg for the weekend. He got to work with five nervous playwrights on short plays they had submitted. Each of us had time with Stephen, and then hours and hours (but far too few hours) through the rest of the Saturday to try to rewrite our scripts in light of Stephen's wise questions. Then, on Sunday, we got to enjoy table readings of the scripts by some of the theatre's regular actors.

The tenterhooks part is this: any day now we should hear which three plays will get full productions in 2015, and which will get staged readings. I would love to see my little script stood up. I can see it pretty clearly in my mind's eye, and there it is both funny and touching. But I am afire to know the affect it would have on an audience who is made up of people who are not me.

You send out scripts and short stories, and over and over again nothing happens. Nothing. But something nice happens just often enough that it adds Christmas-ornament glitter to the workaday hues of the writer's life. I would write even if nobody ever read what I wrote, you know. But having the chance to share what I write with others is really too good to miss.

Pull up your shorts!

King's Theatre in Annapolis Royal is looking for scripts for its annual King's Shorts festival of one-act plays. This is a great example of a really successful event that grew out of a let's-try-it-once bit of risk-taking.

When we lived on St. George Street in Annapolis Royal in the mid-1970's, the theatre was the sort of abandoned structure that looks like it must be on the list to be torn down very soon. Dedicated people and programs put the resources together to save and revitalize the theatre, and it now adorns not just the town but the whole region. People come from far and wide for plays, musical performances, simulcasts of opera, and all sorts of wild stuff. And, when the Farmers' Market is in its normal place during the season on Saturday mornings, the theatre bathrooms are where we all line up and say hi to each other.

I'm walking down to the post office to mail my first entry into the current competition (every playwright can submit two plays). If one of my plays gets chosen, members of the local theatre community will stage it. And the world will turn out to see it. Who could ask for anything more?

Getting there in one piece

One of the reasons we wanted to return to Canada was to be as politically active as I think every citizen ought to be. We haven't cornered the market on morals or ideas, but our ideas and our sense of what is just and right should be part of the political conversation. When we live in the United States we have to be pretty mute since we are not citizens.

The political party we align with, the New Democrats, was the government here in Nova Scotia when we got back to the province last year. And of course it promptly got walloped in an election about a year ago. The premier, who was also leader of the NDP, was defeated in his riding and resigned hi leadership.

Now we are starting to move toward a campaign to select a new party leader. The actual electoral convention won't happen until 2016, but folks interested in offering for the job are already starting to position themselves. This is right and proper: it's a big challenge and should not--cannot--be taken up on a whim.

So what I've been thinking about is how potential candidates should position themselves. The temptation must be to find the most inclusive and least offensive descriptors ("renewed leadership", "put the province on the right track", "end inefficiencies") so that people can gather under your banner even if they might not agree with every single thing you have ever said or thought.

The problem is, this seems to be what the NDP government did as it crashed and burned after only one term. There are some core principles of the NDP, and the government seemed unable either to articulate them or show how their actions harmonized with those principles; and so a lot of folks who might otherwise be assumed to support or at least be open to the NDP sat on their hands or voted elsewhere. (There were other factors at play, of course, including an incessant megaphone of negativity by the corporate media against the "socialist" government.)

It's a standard trope: you have to make compromises to get ahead in the world, and you can end up getting to, or near to, where you wanted to go having abandoned as ballast all the things you once stood for and worked for. And then you have to wonder, was the trip worth it?

Tomorrow night I go to hear one potential candidate, and then I meet with another on Sunday. There is a third who is testing the waters, and I bet there will be a couple more candidates who appear once the rules of the campaign are sorted out. I hope every single one of them stands up loudly and proudly for the party's core principles:

I'll revisit the campaign in future posts, to let y'all know what I'm seeing.

Goodness endures

Every year Mom used to draw and print a Christmas card for the family to use. My dad sent out hundreds of cards each year to colleagues and fellow-clergy in the Episcopal Diocese of New York, so it was probably a real budget-saver as well as being a card recipients looked forward to year after year.

My sister Mary evidently came across a stash of unused cards recently, so today we received in the mail a card that was created for a Christmas in the early 1970's (lookit the telephone on the corner of the piano!):

That's me in the background, with the youthful figure and the dark curly hair. Mary is in front of me; my wife, Rebekah; is at the piano, and Robin is doing her best to help the dogs keep on pitch.

This card reminds me that the good stuff we do can reach far beyond our expectations for it: another good reason for making good stuff (or trying to) whenever we can, without knowing or needing to know who shall become its audience, or how. Thanks, Mom! And thanks to Mary for using the card.

Writing for odd circumstances

I've done a lot of writing of scripts for odd circumstances. I once created a murder mystery that was performed in the first and third cars of a three-car historic steam train running between Holyoke and Westfield, Massachusetts. People in each car had to see all the characters, get enough clues to what was going on, and be entertained. Then we mixed up the seating for the second half of the ride, so people could consult and try to figure out whodunnit.

My current writing project is three short scripts on "flipping the classroom" for an education conference. We are filming using Moviestorm (moviestorm.co.uk), which calls itself "the world's first video sketch tool".

All the elements of creating an animated movie are there, at a fraction of the cost. Moviestorm movies are animations, or more specifically machinima. Will share some with you soon.

We're putting together what we know via a shared whiteboard at realtimeboard.com:

I am creating the scripts using Celtx (celtx.com) with both the offline editing tool and the online shared space (so stakeholders can see how the scripts are developing).

Celtx also makes it easy to set up the shot sequences and build a shooting schedule.

Suppose I should underline that I am a happy user of the technologies I mentioned above, but not employed by any of the firms that make them. Their existence (plus the Internet) makes it possible for me to attempt exciting stuff from a little house in rural Nova Scotia, far away from the hotspots of the film biz. The technologies also let me collaborate with people in California and the UK, removing almost every barrier except the time-zone issue from our project's path.

Search for intelligent life

I have long felt a bond of shared experience with the members of SETI, the organization that searches for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence. They labor long hours, usually on top of the time they spend at their day jobs, preparing for an encounter with beings from elsewhere in the universe.

There is no guarantee that such beings, once encountered, would understand or care about any message we tried to deliver to them. Their motives, ethics, and desires might always be obscured from our understanding. They might regard with puzzlement or dismay the most carefully crafted expression of our hopes, our observations of our world and our lives.

I feel this bond of shared experience because the lonely, earnest, likely-futile-until-maybe-wow work of the SETI folks rhymes with a lot of my experience as a playwright. Despite all the talk about a script being a collaborative creation, until the play or screenplay is on the edge of production, the chief collaboration involves the writer, the writer's fragile imagination, and the interior editor who keeps saying it's all crap. Then, when the writer tries to get the attention of a potential producer--even a potential reader--all too often the response is a sniff of incomprehension. That's not just like everything we have ever seen before (while still being fresh and exciting)! Why should we even peruse it?

That's why writers' groups can be so precious. I recently attended my last meeting with Merrimack Valley Playwrights, a group I founded a few years ago. As usual, there were about 15 people present--playwrights, actors invited for the evening, and a couple of friends who are obviously gluttons for punishment.

The punishment lies in the fact that the scripts the actors perform are unfinished works, still stiff with splinters of uneasy text. But the pleasure lies there, too, as we are the first audience for these dewy words, and can give the new play its first feedback.

I have been part of other groups where the idea seems to be to deliver the most cutting dismissal, whether it is merited or not. But this current group is at the top of the league for creative feedback that the author can carry back to the writing dungeon and actually make use of. So the playwrights are not afraid, or not too afraid, to bring out their skinless, unfinished children for review.

I should explain the hat in the picture. I got to be an actor at this meeting, and one of my characters was obsessed with a pop singer and believed her communicate with her through his complex headgear. So we whipped up the hat as a surprise treat for the playwright--the delight when I put it on reminded me what an innocent, and productive, joy it is to take part in such readings.

It was my last meeting because we are on the edge of relocating. And in the new place, one of the first things I'll do is hunt out the local writers' group. And if there isn't one, I'll start one. SETI keeps searching, and so shall I.