Tag Archives: agent patriot

Jenny Everywhere and the Remixing of Fiction

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One of the things I’ve always had kicking around in the back of my head was doing a story or series of stories using characters in the public domain.

I think some of this comes from the incredible League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (the comics, not the movie), but it goes back further than that. I’ve been a fan of Sherlock Holmes since I was a kid, and I’ve always been interested in other people’s take on the character. Many are pretty bad, but some are interesting, and a few actually add new textures to the character that I didn’t realize before. I’ve always wanted to play around in someone else’s universe and add my own spin on an established character.

With the rise of the Internet, it’s all “open source” and “remixing,” and I’m surprised that it hasn’t happened more often with fiction and public domain characters. For example, the radio serial Box 13 is pretty obscure, but there’s been an iPhone comic of a complete rewrite of Box 13 that has been pretty entertaining (and certainly worth the free download if you have an iPhone). As opposed to League where the characters are decently close analogues to their original inspirations, though, the Box 13 comic only shares a few points of similarity, but otherwise goes in a completely different direction. To me, this is more of a remix of the original fiction (taking the original pieces and moving them around to make a new story), instead of a serious pastiche (keeping the original pieces in place and putting them in a different story).

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Giving Away Agent Patriot

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Zork I was Infocom's first product. This scre...

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A few months back, I talked about poking around with Inform 7 and working on an Agent Patriot text adventure. I realized recently that I’m not going to come back around to this — I just have too many other projects going on to give this the attention it deserves. I learned a lot from working on it, but after repeatedly banging my head into walls with trying to get the system to do what I wanted, I’ve decided to abandon the project.

However, since the Agent Patriot universe is open under Creative Commons, I’m going to throw my cobbled-together code out to the Internet, in case anyone else wanted to pick up the project (or at least see how horribly I botched it). You can download it from my Dropbox account here:

Agent Patriot I — Blitzkrieg: New Amsterdam

I also used Inform 7 to test out some of my initial ideas for Whitechapel. People really interested in the minutae of my process can check out the Inform 7 files for that project as well:

The Whitechapel Project

You will need to download Inform 7 to use either of these files. You should beable to just expand them, move the folders to Inform 7′s "Projects" folder, and open the project in Inform 7.

There’s a chance I might flirt with Inform 7 down the road, but I think I’ll approach it with a story that’s actually suited for the medium, instead of trying to work an existing piece of fiction into the IF format.

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Whitechapel, Katrina Night and Beer

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Originally published at The Whitechapel Project (for MP3s and polls, click this link). You can comment here or there.

First, a quick Whitechapel update. Episode 1 is written, and I have some final revisions in mind before I record it. I still have to work a little on my reading speed (which is why I gave myself more time — I’m anticipating quite a number of takes the first time through), but overall things are looking good for the August 5th release.

I did want to take a moment to point out that the Whitechapel Project site is, in fact, more than just the Whitechapel novella (although I anticipate it will likely be the majority of the site’s focus — hence the name). I had been considering a blog for my fiction for quite some time, but it wasn’t until Whitechapel that I had a project big enough to warrant the initial start-up work¹. But I always expected that other fiction would cluster around this site — in fact, if you check out the “About the Project” page, I’ve already got a couple of other projects in mind.

What I didn’t expect is that I would start getting more ideas right away.

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Writing like a programmer

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So on Sunday I got a weird idea to make a small computer game. There are tons of free options to make a variety of computer games, and I figure since I work for a video game company, I should learn something about the process. However, I’m not a programmer nor an artist, so my options quickly got whittled down. I was about to toss out the idea as just a lark when I stumbled across Inform 7.

Now, I’m no stranger to text adventures (or as they’re known as now, “interactive fiction”), both when they originally popular and the resurgence of innovation in the medium in the 90s and early 21st century. I fell out of touch with it around the time I started seriously freelancing, so I missed the release of software that lets you program IF games in English.

PROGRAM IN ENGLISH.

I have been obsessed with this ever since. As I dig into it, it’s not nearly as magical as it first seemed — getting the software to do things like combat requires some heavy coding (or “rules creation” in Inform terms) — but there’s also an active community of people who create extensions Firefox-style that you can plug into a game. The only downside so far is that they’re usually pretty hefty (for a word game — 256k is actually a meaningful amount of space), but for what I’m doing, that’s fine for now.

After going from pointless and random noodling to wanting to making something cohesive, I decided that a wacky pulp story would work well with an unambitious text adventure, so I dusted off my old friend Agent Patriot and started working on an actual adventure. In three days, he hasn’t left his office, but I’m building a lot of the infrastructure.

I can’t entirely explain why this appeals to me so much. I’ve written a bit for EVE Online, as well as another MMO project, and I’ve learned that writing for a video game is very different from both fiction and RPG writing. Playing with Inform 7, I’m getting a lot of that same vibe that I did working on those projects. The big difference for me is that I can compile the program and see my results right away, so I can modify and stretch the story as needed based on the limitations of my software or my knowledge.

But this does lead to situations like last night, when I stayed up until past midnight trying to keep a character from continuing to clean Agent Patriot’s office after he died. I finally figured it out, only to realize that it didn’t matter — the game probably shouldn’t continue if that character died anyhow. But that work isn’t thrown out, because I learned a LOT about how to construct similar situations in future, and I’ve increased my options for later story development.

(I admit that I just cheated and got a combat plug-in. It works almost exactly how I wanted it to, so it was a LOT of work I just didn’t need to do.)

I’ve always liked writing fiction to tell a certain story, and I’ve always liked writing and running RPGs to let others tell a story as well. But somewhere in the middle there’s a range of collaboration between writer and audience that I want to explore more. This is one avenue — I have another one kicking around as well (the elusive “Whitechapel” idea I’ve mentioned) that I want to wait until we’ve moved before I pursue further. And has shown me a third avenue that I like as well. Maybe we should collaborate on a project at some point.

This does mean that my original idea of trying to get back and committing to daily wordcounts is kind of shot, but I think this is all valuable work to improve my skills as a writer overall. As technology continues to evolve, I think there’s going to be new ways to close the gap between writer and audience, and I can’t see how that kind of interaction will do anything but help me to become a better writer overall.