Zarf Updates

If you'd looked at me in 2000, you would have said "Andrew Plotkin is a young author of award-winning interactive fiction. He has a long IF-writing career ahead of him." And I would have agreed! I might have had a notion of branching out -- my IF career had made almost zero money, so maybe I should take my experience into the game industry in other ways. But really I wasn't thinking along those lines. I had a tolerable day job; writing IF was a rewarding hobby.

But this picture of me as "prolific IF author" was already yellowing around the edges. Sure, I wrote lots of games in the 21st century. I did Dreamhold, which was big and deliberately retro, but after that I didn't really have an idea for a big game. I entered Delightful Wallpaper in the 2006 IFComp; but after that it felt weird to enter IFComp, even anonymously. (I entered again in 2011 but that was a collaborative project.) I wrote a few short games for jams and showcases.

It just felt like I was pushing myself. Looking for reasons to get myself off my ass and write a game. Because if I wasn't writing games, what kind of game writer was I?

Nothing screams "writing accountability" like a Kickstarter, right? There's Hadean Lands in a nutshell. "It'll take a year," I said, blithely extrapolating from my previous games. (Dreamhold and S&W were of similar scale. I landed each of those in under a year, holding down day jobs.)

Hadean Lands took four years. A year of which, I admit, I spent avoiding Hadean Lands. When I finally buckled down to implementing the game, I still procrastinated on writing the story. If the four main characters you encounter feel somewhat sketchy and peripheral to the game, that's because I had a terrible time focusing on them.

I guess I was pushing myself there, too. My games have never been big on NPC interaction -- S&W is the honorable but eccentric exception. In HL I put four character roles up on the whiteboard and told myself, "Now you have to do character writing!" Oy. Yeah, I did it; I don't hate it; but it's not what people talk about when they talk about Hadean Lands.

What kind of a writer am I?

In a story -- see, this is character writing -- a grizzled Beat poet in a flammable hat would have leaped out of a bush, grabbed my lapels, and shouted "Wrong question, dumbass!" And then set his hat on fire and danced off down the street singing the Marseillaise, or possibly "Pianoman", I haven't decided which.

That did not happen. Instead, I got together with some folks and started the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation.

That hardly sounds like an answer to "What kind of writer are you?" But that's the point, right? I leaped into being an IF community organizer. A couple of years later I was launching a conference. It was great. It was a natural growth of my long-time role in the IF community. I had cred; I could use it to make good things happen. I could make games too if I felt like it.

I am skimming the sore spots here, of course. I still wanted to be a person who made games. I still felt blocked on writing. I just had other work which was satisfying in a different way. The true sage would have painted landscapes and chopped wood, but knowing that doesn't help.

Last month I stepped down as an IFTF officer. I'm still a conference volunteer (did we mention registration is open?) but I'm not the showrunner. I am actively resisting show-running decisions. This is harder than it sounds.

What kind of community organizer am I? At least this time I can call myself a dumbass and set my own hat on fire.

So anyway, I played Wanderstop.

...Comic timing demands I should end this post right there. Sorry! I really do have a couple of things to say about Wanderstop.

But first, the disclosure: I worked on Wanderstop! A little bit, four years ago. You can catch me in the credits as "Tools Programming Consultant".

The truth is that I didn't work on the game at all. I gave the developers some guidance on the dialogue scripting tool they were hammering together. As I recall, I added some features to make their editing loop easier.

I played the 2021 prototype for a few minutes. I saw a version of the protagonist; I made tea with the Big Wacky Tea Machine. I glanced at the pages of dialogue that existed then, but I was thinking about the script format, not the content.

So I am writing this review as a player, not a developer. Or this review-like object, or whatever it is I do when I write about games.

(What kind of a game reviewer am I?)

So anyway, I played Wanderstop. A game about "change and tea", the press kit says. A game that Davey Wreden poured "[his] absolute heart and soul into", Wreden says. A game about a championship sword fighter who is stuck in a tea-shop time-management sim and it is pissing her off. That is Wanderstop.

Nobody's surprised that the Beginner's Guide guy has written another intensely personal game. The question is how it hits for people, and that's hard to answer because how it hits is also intensely personal. Which is why I just wrote a thousand-word essay on my life 25 years after Shade.

I don't know. I am up for a game about burnout, exhaustion, and feeling blocked. I am up for a game about the pen being too heavy to lift. But Alta, Wanderstop's fighter, is not me. Alta talks about control, about working harder than anybody else. Alta sees herself as being the best. She can't deal with losing a fight because she has no other identity. (This isn't a spoiler, it's the intro narration.) She can't tell any other story about herself than "I am the best" or "I will use this setback to come back even better."

I never wanted to be the best. Oh, it's nice to be on top. I felt a sting when Shade placed tenth in IFComp. But that's not definitional, it's not my story. I guess the story I tell is about impressing people, surprising people, doing something nobody thought of before. Making games people talk about. (Shade was that!)

"My next project must be even more impressive and surprising than my last one." That's the pen-shaped boulder I have trouble carrying. Of course when I put it that baldly, it's just a flaming hat. Why do I do this to myself? Why can't Alta just relax and make some tea? This is a tea-making game.

But Alta, or Wreden, is carrying a different sword-shaped rock.

It's interesting, isn't it? The Beginner's Guide felt universal -- we all got it. Not all fans are like that; most fans aren't like that; but there's always that one fan. Or maybe I'm just a sucker for the unreliable narrator.

Wanderstop is expressive and personal, but it's not universal. Alta tells me her obsessions but I don't feel them myself. I can make the tea with her, I can drink the tea with her, but I can't carry her sword. I mean, I can't fail to carry her sword.

There's one bit where you go to sweep up some leaves -- this is an optional time-management task -- and Alta goes martial-arts ham on the sweeping. Because fighter reflexes. In that moment, I felt myself in her skin. But it's a tiny thing.

Really, half the game's character work comes out in animation and body language. The moments when Alta levers herself up off the bench and heads down to the shop: I could feel that in my thighs, every time.

(The lead animator mentions that in one prototype, the intro scene was playable and you could do sword slashes. But: "I’m very glad we cut this, I think it would have set very incorrect expectations for players." I agree! But the contrast would have said something. Wandersong, no relation, started with exactly this sword-then-no-sword intro -- it really set the scene.)

I suspect that some percentage of players will walk out of Wanderstop saying "Yes, exactly that, that's exactly how it is!" Others, like me, will come out saying "Huh. I guess that's how it is for some people."

Here's what I didn't come out saying: "I didn't know how it was for you, but now I get it." Well, maybe you don't get my story either.

I called this a review. Well, no, I didn't; that's what you called it. But I'll go along.

A review would start by saying that Wanderstop is sharp and funny and chill and easy to get drawn into. Alta is a great character, which is good, because her character is the whole of the game. She sits and drinks tea and tells you stories about her life. (Whenever you decide she should, which is up to you.) The stories are solid; they're a life.

Boro, I dunno about. He's a tea monk. (Yes, Wanderstop was in progress before A Psalm for the Wild-Built was published.) He offers an alternative to everything you're going through: it is "make a cup of tea". He gives you space, literally. It's good that he's around but I don't think I'll miss him.

The other game characters are, well, not so much characters. They're questions directed at Alta. Precise jabs at her world-view, from every direction. Exactly what Boro isn't. They're fun to interact with, but for how you react to them, not for themselves.

(I'll grant the kid as an exception, but that's the last chapter, so no spoilers.)

It's a beautiful tea shop in a beautiful clearing. Then the light changes -- time passes, though not seasons -- and it's beautiful in a different way. This goes on. I will miss that, now that it's over.

I wanted the gardening and tea-brewing mechanics to have more surprises. But I didn't go looking for surprises, so that's my own damn fault. The game is perfectly clear that everything, up to and including the tea, is optional. I followed the notebook carefully so I got a game with notebook recipes. I'm positive there's more to find, both in the gardens and the tea machine.

And then all the stuff I said above, about how I don't think the story will hit with everybody. One ambivalent paragraph at the end after all the enthusiastic good stuff. If you just want to know whether to play Wanderstop, please pretend I did that!

What kind of a person am I? I don't think Alta ever asks that question. Her character note is "I don't want to be that person!" Very different.

I write these blog posts. I'm proud of that. I do open-source work for the IF community. That's a whole other story with its own hangups, but I do it. I help run a conference. I do not, at present, have much of a job. (A bit of contract work; could use more; DM me.)

I have twenty years' worth of notes for "Hey, a game could work like this. That would be surprising and impressive and people would talk about it." Mostly they haven't turned into games. I could close this editor window, push this post out, and go straight to writing chapter one of the tea game.

Will I? Maybe after lunch.

(Yes, my latest notes file is titled tea-game. It's not this tea game, nor is it Universe For Sale, nor any of the other tea/coffee/brewing games out there. I can write a tea game if I want to. Just gotta pick up that pen--)