A scene from the game Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation; image via Ubisoft Entertainment SA.
Day 2: Saturday 22 February
On Saturday morning, Carol, a self-confessed fantasy nerd, attended the first of three sessions on gaming. Titled ‘The Writer and the Game’, it featured Jill Murray (Assassin’s Creed III ‘Liberation’ and IV ‘Black Flag’); Clint Hocking (Splinter Cell, Far Cry 2) and Guy Gadney (The Suspect) in conversation with Bajo, host of ABC2’s ‘Good Game’. The audience ranged across age, gender and ethnicity and reflected the dynamic nature of Perth’s gaming scene.
To refer to someone as a game writer is, it seems, something of a misnomer, for this is not the craft of the solitary novelist but that of a diverse team. The writer may write the actual script, but the story is created by the entire team, each member of which is in constant communication with the others. There may, in fact, be several writers with various skill sets, but game planners, artists and technicians will all have input as well.
The first question is always ‘How will this story function within the game?’ Because the players’ moves will influence the characters’ actions and reactions, each possibility must be carefully programmed. The infrastructure must allow for every conceivable player reaction. Sometimes the writing has to be done in Excel rather than in Word to allow for the possibilities to be properly plotted. As one panellist put it, ‘A novel is a monologue, but a game has to be a dialogue that allows for infinite possibilities’. Creating and maintaining tension is essential, of course, so every action has to be contained within a loop that will gently pull the player back to the story. Game writing is ‘interactive fiction’, which means stories have to be open-ended. The actual story is often just a set of guidelines for the designers, yet the writer must always be involved, even after the game is published, for constant updates are done in response to player feedback. In a sense, game writing and programming are never finished, with weekly updates commonplace.
Players tend to become emotionally attached to their characters, and the panellists pointed out that gaming has perhaps even more potential than books and films to demonstrate facets of the human condition. Gaming is rapidly becoming a dominant art form.
Carol then moved to Winthrop Hall to hear Ellen Catton discuss her Man Booker prize-winning novel, The Luminaries, with Australian journalist Susan Wyndham. Catton, not yet thirty, has a rare talent. She was the youngest-ever winner of the prestigious award, and is only the second New Zealander to win it—the previous NZ winner took the award 29 years earlier, a full Saturn cycle. The Luminaries, at nearly 800 pages, is also noteworthy for being the longest book ever to win the Man Booker Award. It’s a New Zealand Gold Rush story, starting with a man who stumbles into a secret gathering of 12 people, one for each sign of the zodiac. The book is devoted to untangling the 12 crimes these people have committed. Catton describes her book as being a cross between Murder on the Orient Express and The Brothers Karamazov as well as ‘a detective story without a detective’! Planetary cycles are important in The Luminaries. Back in the nineties, Catton became interested in the work of Carl Jung, whose teachings on archetypes led her to the study of astrology. References to the astrologer’s craft abound in the work. A miniseries is planned, but in order for this to be a success, much of the material will need to be reorganised into chronological order. On the printed page, it jumps between past and present.
Meanwhile, Ilsa lingered further amid the paradoxes that are India. In an afternoon session facilitated by Perth-based author and visual artist, Tineke Van der Eecken, Robyn Davidson of Tracks fame, a part-time resident of India and author of Desert Places (her firsthand account of a nomadic pastoralist culture in north-western India) pointed out that you no sooner say one thing about India than you have to admit that the opposite is also true. Her fellow panellists Delhi-resident, Jeet Thayil, (Narcopolis, 2012 Man Booker shortlist), and Indian/Sikh-Canadian, Jaspreet Singh, (Helium [2013]) agreed wholeheartedly with her on this point.
In the morning, self-proclaimed ‘proseur’ Jeet Thayil, a prose-poet, discussed India, his Syrian-Christian, Malayalee roots in the south-western state of Kerala, and his first novel Narcopolis (2012) with Stephen Romei, a literary editor at The Australian. The book depicts a little known side of 1970s Bombay (Thayil’s preferred name for that city) alias ‘Narcopolis’. The author stunned his audience with the beauty of his ‘moonlight tales that vanish in sunlight like vampire dust’, to quote his daring prose-poetry prologue to Narcopolis, which he says features a single sentence spanning six pages. Thayil, a former journalist and son of a journalist, has walked on the wild side, for 20 years frequenting the now defunct opium dens of Bombay, an episode that he portrays almost as some romantic fin-de-siècle idyll, also comparing the experience to ‘falling into a warm bath’. A former addict, Thayil depicts Bombay’s underbelly, a terrain he knows intimately. Narcopolis was not cathartic for him, rather the opposite: ‘I felt I was taking a lot of dangerous and unhealthy material into myself.’ He labels long-form fiction, ‘drudgery’ for the writer. Assailed at first by excoriating reviews from the Indian domestic press, Thayil was appalled to see the pundits change their position almost overnight once he had attracted positive attention from the West: ‘Pathetic’, he snorts, ‘It’s a colonial sickness.’
In both the morning and afternoon sessions on India, the audience was warned to avoid the complacency that India had somehow modernised overnight: Thayil said that in the villages of India, things were much the same as they had been for the past 300 years, including the ancient caste system, while Singh fretted that what change there has been, has been negative, including an increasing tendency to ban books—India after all, had been the first country to ban Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, well before the infamous fatwā against the book and its author.
For something completely different, Ilsa took five to visit a panel discussion focusing on political correctness, featuring Perth author Richard King, journalist Malcolm Knox (Boom: The Underground History of Australia, From Gold Rush to GFC, 2013) and West Australian journalist-facilitator Danielle Benda. This topic astonishingly attracted a full-capacity crowd eager to explore this contentious issue with King, the author of the recently published book On Offence. With one expected participant absent (senior journalist Mike Carlton was incapacitated by a recent eye operation), the level of discussion unfortunately travelled some rather predictable grooves (Prophet Mohamed cartoons, Adam Goodes etc), failing to stretch the usually impressive King. Also, the session disappointingly neglected to discuss the subtler details of politically correct vocabulary and language.
Carol concluded her day with a visit to the outdoors ‘Tropical Grove’ to sample a panel composed of WA author Amanda Curtin, bestseller British historical romance writer Jo Baker and Australian novelist Catherine Jinks chatting to Australian editor-writer Rose Michael about the use of archaic or foreign languages in historical novels. How does one capture authentic speech styles of days gone by without irritating or boring the reader? The three authors each read from their own work to demonstrate their methods. Amanda Curtin’s latest book, Elemental, starts out in Scotland with the characters speaking Doric, the popular name for Mid-northern and North-east Scots. Later, the main character, Maggie, travels to Shetland, where a dialect based on Old Norse still flourishes. This necessitated a considerable amount of research on the part of the author. Catherine Jinks uses a London dialect in her children’s book, How to Catch a Bogle, which is aimed at the middle school years. Jinks recommends that medieval novelists translate medieval Latin texts into modern English but aim to keep the rhythm of the original. Maintain that rhythm in your dialogue and you can end up with something that encapsulates the style of the period. In Longbourn, Jo Baker has deliberately contrasted the speech of the lower orders around whom the story is based with the more elegant tones of Jane Austen’s Bennet family. The main thing, of course is to avoid anachronisms when writing in a historical period, while not letting the prose become ridiculously affected.
Click here for our review of Perth Writers Festival: Day One
Click here for our review of Perth Writers Festival: Lionel Shriver and Martin Amis
Click here for our review of Perth Writers Festival: Day Three
Perth Writers Festival
Perth International Arts Festival
www.perthfestival.com.au
20 – 23 February
