Links, thoughts, stuff:

• Occupy the first person plural. If you only read one thing on this list, read this one. An excellent piece of writing.
• Anonymous: An ignorant assault on Shakespeare. The WSWS rarely has good film reviews, but if there is one thing that sets my teeth on edge, it’s bullshit like the Shakespeare “authorship question.” And no, I haven’t seen the movie, and you might say I’m strossing, but I don’t think that’s the case here. I can tell you that any movie that claims the Holocaust didn’t happen is crap, and the same goes for any movie that tries to push this long-disproven elitist rubbish on people.
• We attended a presentation of the new Robert Harris book, The Fear Index, featuring the man himself. He was charming and nice and signed Verena’s copy of Imperium.
• I’m currently reading China Miéville’s Iron Council. After Perdido Street Station impressed me with some of its ideas but massively pissed me off with its plot and structure,  this one is a pleasant surprise. I’m not done yet, so there’s still room for a fuckup, but everything I’ve read so far has been much more enjoyable and meaningful.
• I recently read The Alphabet by David Sacks (a book known under a variety of titles). Parts of it were quite interesting, but there was entirely too much repetition, to a large degree because the book originally was a series of newspaper articles. It also contained a number of annoying factual errors, mostly about the pronunciation of words in languages I happen to speak, which unfortunately had the effect of making me question what else might be wrong. Still, if you know nothing about the subject matter (and I happen to know a fair amount, given my general interests and my studies, so I’m probably not the book’s intended audience), you’ll probably find that the story of one of our most important inventions is quite a fascinating one.
• I can’t wait to have a proper internet connection again. This situation has really crippled our ability to work.
• Anne McCaffrey died. I don’t want to be mean about her. I think her books are astoundingly terrible, and sexist to boot. I don’t know what to say without sounding condescending. Verena read her books as a child and thus got into reading, so I can’t say the woman didn’t do any good in the world; inspiring people to read is a great thing. But I still think her writing is terrible.
• The Gnome’s Lair review of Fate of the World is interesting, and mentions something that I think deserves a detailed analysis: the way the climate change situation is often discussed only within the parameters of the current economic and political system, when in fact it is that very system which is causing the problem, or at least making it near-impossible to fix. It’s kind of like wondering how we could get the Nazis to treat the Jews better. By not electing those fuckers, that’s how.
• It’s getting more and more uncomfortable to be Greek in Germany these days. Newspapers raving about “the Greeks,” people casually repeating the most absurd nonsense, and of course everyone having to comment on the situation the moment they realize you’re Greek, as if you were personally responsible for destroying Germany. The other day we were shopping and someone had put up an anti-Greece poster on the wall next to his stall. I never fail to be shocked by how willing people are to be fed the latest scapegoat. Especially in Germany, where they should really know better.
• And in Greece itself, as well as in Italy, we now don’t even need the appearance of democracy anymore, we just switch governments when the markets tell us to. As a friend of mine recently put it to me, “I hate the markets because they made me sympathize with Berlusconi.” Do we really have to keep taking this crap so a few douchebags can keep paying for cocaine and hookers? Our ecocomic system isn’t just problematic, it’s a fucking joke. Does anyone even know what these “markets” are? What do they have to do with the reality of work and production? Nothing, absolutely nothing. We’re shutting down schools to pay for a casino.
• Something more positive from Greece: Greek adventure gaming site Adventure Advocate published an article about me. That doesn’t really counterbalance the whole, you know, destruction of the country by an idiotic international financial elite thing, but it did make me smile, so hey. I was particularly fascinated by the part where my work is categorized into two “phases” (the first being darker and more lonely, the second more open, more satirical and generally more social and colourful) – it may even be true (though I don’t see my work like that), but it’s extremely odd to be talked about in this way. Not bad-odd, just odd.
• Is it just me or does Skyrim have some of the worst voice acting ever recorded? I read various journalists claiming that it all sounded so authentic, so Scandinavian, but… err, what? Is this like that thing where English-speaking people really, really don’t get what German is supposed to sound like? (If you actually speak German, going to the movies can be a painful experience. X-Men: First Class caused a mixture of shock and giggling in the cinema when Kevin Bacon spoke… eh, “German.”) Granted, I’ve only seen the first 30-40 minutes of the game, since my PC is going to hell and I can’t get any 3D game to work without hanging, and no I haven’t bought Skyrim (I’m waiting for the GOTY edition)… but I have seen quite a few NPCs speak, and there is nothing authentic about that shit. In fact, their accents sound half Russian, half Austrian, their pronunciation of names is utterly American, and their children apparently all went to a boarding school in the US. It is, sadly, hilarious. How can a big-budget title like this be so amateurish? And let’s not even mention the writing, which made me groan before the intro was even over. What happened to the people who made something as brilliant as Morrowind?
• I hope you’re enjoying The Oneiropolis Compendium. We certainly are, and while it’s not making us rich, it’s keeping us from starving (literally). If you enjoy the entries, it would be awesome if you could retweet them, share them with friends who might like them, rate them up on StumbleUpon, and generally use the potential of social media to spread the word. Thanks.

I’ve written one of them, and since it’s unlikely to appear in a magazine, I present it here. I’m too sick to be at Occupy Frankfurt, so let this be my contribution to the struggle for today.

Share it. Spread it. Retweet it.

I make no apologies.

I guess it’s different if you keep these things around you as you grow up, or if you continue to live in the same place where you grew up. But I moved away from home years ago, and these books had long been packed up in boxes by then. It’s all impossibly far away, almost like it’s someone else’s childhood.

Coming back to Greece is always a strange experience, but this year doubly so.

Maybe that’s why I like Stephen King so much.  His writing has a folksy, American kind of lyricism that I find deeply enjoyable. It flows melodically, and yet every now and then I stop to admire a passage of particular beauty.

More of that, please.

Note that I’m not saying all narrative is gameplay, or that only narrative is gameplay. I’m just going to talk about my perspective; about the authorial intent behind my work, if you will.

One of the more common complaints I see in players’ comments is “This is well-written, but there is so much text, I might as well read a book!” Apart from the obvious question – what’s so terrible about reading a book? – there’s something really interesting to consider here. Are these games really just books (or short stories) with interactive bits thrown in? Could you easily just turn them into a book?

Obviously I believe the answer to be a resounding no. But let me explain. What is it that makes these interactive stories different from their printed counterparts?

Nonlinearity. Games like The Infinite Ocean and The Book of Living Magic are inherently non-linear experiences. Certain tasks must be accomplished in a certain order, but much of the interaction can happen in any order; crucially, the text is designed so it can be read in a multiplicity of orders. And these orders profoundly affect the player’s emotional as well as intellectual experience.

Exploration. As a result of the above, understanding the story is an active process – the player explores the story instead of being presented with it. Understanding what is going on in The Infinite Ocean requires the player to locate the relevant texts, read them, think about them, and put together the clues. You could visualize the game (and several of my other games) as not one linear text to be read from beginning to end, but as interconnected textual spaces that need to be explored.

World-building. A lot of praise for The Book of Living Magic focuses on the fact that you can click on almost every single object in the gameworld and get an interesting description. This, however, is not seen as gameplay. I suppose such descriptions are seen as incidental; as a writer/designer, I could not disagree more. The ability to put in this kind of world-building detail is something that makes games absolutely unique, and it is central, not incidental, to games like The Book of Living Magic. In a novel, there is little space for the non-essential; if you tried to put all the descriptions from the game into a book, it would end up reading like a long list of bad and increasingly desperate puns (i.e. Xanth). No other medium can offer you the experience of walking around by your own choosing and finding silly little details – and getting a better understanding of the game’s world as you do.

Perspective. The fact that games always feature an active point of view (you’re always doing something from some kind of perspective) allows for certain styles of storytelling than other media cannot replicate. The player in The Infinite Ocean must ask: who am I playing? What is this perspective? Who is walking through these rooms, interacting with these computers? Many books deal with the question of who the author of a text is – but in The Infinite Ocean, the question is who the reader is. A book could not create the sense of immediacy and questioning of The Infinite Ocean – not in the same way, anyway.

Time. Computer games are the medium of the present tense. Events in games take place now – they are experienced as they happen, not retold in the past tense. Even in The Infinite Ocean, in which you mostly spend your time reading about events of the past, all of that is happening right now – you’re reading that journal on that computer, not someone’s account of how someone read the journal. This may seem trivial, but it is in fact a very different experience.

All of these elements combine to create a form of interactive storytelling that I would say constitutes gameplay as much as anything else in games does. In some games, you click on the enemy soldier and the enemy soldier dies, removing an obstacle to victory. In my games, you click on an object and it gives you a description, removing an obstacle to understanding.

And if you think silliness isn’t part of understanding, well, you clearly don’t know much about the Lands of Dream.

Verena’s almost-novella Life Support is now available on Kindle for very little money. It’s a beautiful story, and if you enjoy character-oriented fiction and/or sci-fi, it’s really worth buying. Trust me. If you liked The Infinite Ocean, this is for you.

As always, your assistance in spreading the word is greatly appreciated. It’s hard to break into the writing world today, especially for people who are more interested in the poetic and the thoughtful than in gimmickry and fashionable nihilism, so your help can make a big difference.

What the hell is this, you might ask, and why hasn’t Jonas told us about it? Well, dear readers, this is a screenplay. More specifically, this is a screenplay I have uploaded to Amazon Studios to participate in their monthly contest, which is being guest judged by my favourite writer of all time. Which, I realize, means nothing in terms of my chances to win – but somehow it galvanized me into writing this script. A script which I am actually rather proud of, even though I’m sure it can use a couple of small revisions here and there.

I’d like you to read it. If you’ve enjoyed my work, you should enjoy this; even though it’s only a script, you should be able to imagine the movie I would make out of this.

Don’t be put off by the fact that it’s a script. Really. The story is right there. Trust me. Especially if you enjoyed The Infinite Ocean or Phenomenon 32.

But remember that I want you to read it, not proofread it. I’m not looking for criticism; or, to be more precise, I don’t want you to read it with that mindset. Read it as a story told by a writer you like. Let it transport you. Take the words and make images in your mind.

After you’ve read it, and if you enjoyed it, I would like to ask you to write something positive about it on Amazon Studios. I know it’ll take a few moments, and taking a few moments is usually something none of us feel like doing on the internet (and I’m not excluding myself from that!), but it would really make a difference. If you’re visiting this website – and there’s several hundred people who do that on a regular basis – then you probably like what I write. This is a chance to help me get closer to being able to tell more stories. You know I’m not in it for the money or the fame, or I wouldn’t be making the kinds of games that I make. I have a lot more stories to tell, and in this small way you can help me do that. I’d appreciate it. (But only if you really read the script and liked it!)

Anyway. A strange planet awaits you. Go explore it.

The first thing is that The Lord of the Rings is such excellent literature. People talk so much about the setting and the constructed languages that they forget the sheer aesthetic beauty and literary depth of the novel. It’s not a great fantasy novel, it’s simply a great novel. I wish more readers would understand and appreciate this, including “fantasy readers” – so that maybe all these shitty hacks who can’t put two sentences together will stop selling a billion books on the basis of writing “fantasy.” (And yes, there are also contemporary novelists who write fantasy and are great – like Peter S. Beagle, or Patricia McKillip, or Steven Erikson.)

The second thing is that The Lord of the Rings is funny. By which I mean that there are many humorous passages and dialogues, and they are genuinely funny. Which just underscores the absurdity of the Peter Jackson films and their crass, immersion-breaking jokes. If you want Gimli to be funny, you don’t need to turn him into a clownish caricature; the character in the book has many funny things to say – without making any references to other movies or to anachronistic medical knowledge – and is loveable to boot. The same goes for Merry and Pippin, who are witty and charming and immensely likeable, instead of overly goofy and dumb. Or Legolas! Legolas isn’t just a series of stoic looks and CGI stunts; he is often quite funny, and his conversations with Gimli are beautiful, because they really are friends (and not just caricatures of the Other Races). Jackson and his screenwriters had all that and more to choose from, and instead they gave us dwarf-tossing jokes.

INT. KYRATZES APARTMENT – NIGHT

JONAS and VERENA are about to go to bed. They look tired after a long day of work.

JONAS

You know what sucks?

VERENA

What?

JONAS

Vacuum cleaners.

Verena GRUMBLES at the terrible joke.

JONAS

You know what else sucks?

VERENA

(annoyed)

What?

JONAS

Black holes.

VERENA

(annoyed)

Mhm.

A moment passes.

JONAS

You know what else sucks?

VERENA

(very annoyed)

What?

JONAS

Sucky McSuck of Sucktown.

VERENA

(evil stare)

Aha.

Another moment passes.

JONAS

You know what really sucks?

VERENA

(exasperated)

What?

JONAS

Sucky McSuck of Sucktown falling into a black hole with a vacuum cleaner.

VERENA is beyond words. JONAS collapses into mad giggling.

My new article for the Escapist is up: The Bolshevik in the Borderlands (I didn’t come up with that title, but I rather like it).