Dual worlds, possibly pertinent to craft. If not, a game review.

[leahbobet]

I think I might have figured out something about dual-world fantasy. It feels like a small something, but hey. They always do after you figure them out.

Okay, so remember a few weeks ago when I took a week off the internet? Yes, that week. So as part of my deliberate program of relaxing, slacking off, and refilling my brain during that week, I bought The Longest Journey, a ten-year-old adventure game, and its sequel, Dreamfall. I love adventure games. Looking at things and sticking stuff in my inventory together in clever ways gives me a bizarre little thrill in my cold, black heart that I cannot entirely explain. So every evening after work I came home, fixed dinner, and played computer games until bedtime.

(It was glorious.)

The second game ends on a cliffhanger. And while usually I am pretty good at compartmentalizing story, it has been driving me crazy since. And it's not even that I want to find out how the story ends, which is good because the average time between games in this series is something like nine years. What I want is back into the world. Worlds.

Worlds, I think, is key.

You see, The Longest Journey is about two parallel worlds: a still-recognizable this-world set 200 or so years in the future, Stark, and a medievalesque fantasy world, Arcadia. The protagonists of each game originate in Stark but can move between the two, which is the major point of conflict. The plot, while the writing's gorgeous and head and shoulders above most game writing I've seen even ten years after the first game came out, is in some ways pretty standard: it has a Girl From Another World. It has a Chosen One Plot. It has a need to return a status quo into existence. It has a tour of the entire fantasy world map. It has an antipathy and balance between science and magic. It subverts some of these tropes like hell, but it is founded upon them.

But it also has Stark and Arcadia. And the thing is? They're both wonderful.

So I think this might be the key to Girl From Another World Fantasy. It's one thing to write a bare-bones, filler, placeholder, boring hell of a world from which one can joyfully escape to the bigger but more interesting problems of a fantasy world, and that's often what happens. In the Fionavar books, Toronto barely exists. It's set pieces and cardboard, put there to get away from. Likewise with the now in Thomas Covenant. But it's another to write two worlds which are equally rich and deep, equally realized, equally interesting.

Is that just good writing? Well, yeah. But it's not an aspect of good writing that seems to be required in the formalisms of that subgenre. My favourite Girl From Another World books, Ru Emerson's Night Threads series, do this, and they're supposed to be a subversion. But they're a subversion that works better than most of the source material for me: by making 1990s California just as real and loved as Rhadaz, they makes the characters real. Our Heroes go "shit, this would have worked at home" or "why is everyone here medieval and crazy?" or "I miss my cello" and the whole thing springs into colour. They leave people behind. They lose hard-earned possessions, friendships, jobs. They had lives, and even though a life in the real world can be bad, there is no such thing as a person without a life, period. Girl From Another World Fantasy, in theory at least, takes us from one life to another; we travel. Going from depression, or blankness, or nothing to that fantasy life? Is not travel, because there was nothing, for good or ill, to leave behind.

In this game, Stark gets left behind. And Stark mattered. It was beautiful and complex and vast and full of green parks and artists' colonies and bridges, and it had our protagonist's friends and family in it. And that's the thing that has me considering playing The Longest Journey again, even though I know every answer to every puzzle. Both of these places were someone's dream, someone's yearning. Both of them were treated like the beautiful fantasy world.

Someone wrote them while loving them, so I'm in love.

Comments

[marydell.livejournal.com]

I am STILL so messed up about the ending of Dreamfall! I played TLJ when it launched, and had to wait forever for DF, and now I'm waiting forever for the sequel. What if they never make it AAAIIIEE!

Sometimes I dream bits of the games, including the bad dialogue in TLJ where that one guy keeps addressing her as "girl."

Best gameworlds ever.

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

What I'm yearning for? Is April's neighbourhood. That big mural-covered house and the cafes and squares and bridges and the park and the sunshine. I want to live there. I want to go live in relative penury and lack of air conditioning there.

Seeing it how it was in DF broke my heart in two.

[marydell.livejournal.com]

Oh, yeah. I totally want to live there; also I want to be a young art student who can do magic stuff.

Have you seen the wallpapers and stuff on the DF site? They sort of help with the mourning period.

[marydell.livejournal.com]

I found whence my favorite wallpapers came...over here.

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

Oh hey. :) I was looking at the screenshots on the DF site and wishing they were wallpaper...

[marydell.livejournal.com]

The concept art is mostly of a near-wallpapery size, and the character paintings are very cool, so I used those for, jeez, ages as my wallpaper (2 monitors; twice the obsession). For screen caps there's a utility called fraps that will let you screen cap from inside games, although it's a bit of a pain in the butt (free version caps as bmp only, for one thing). Worth it if you're obsessed with gamely eye candy, though.

[marydell.livejournal.com]

I uploaded my screen caps here: http://pics.livejournal.com/marydell/gallery/0000ydp1

Along with some Oblivion screen caps...that's the game I turned to when Dreamfall abandoned me!

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

Ooh, thanks. I have stolen one, if that's all right.

[marydell.livejournal.com]

Definitely, and feel free to re-use for whatever (iconage, giving to others, etc).

Looking at them reminds me of how utterly freaked out I was by that creepy little girl :)

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

It was the house that freaked me out, actually. It just looked so...jagged and fragile.

[eiriene.livejournal.com]

I love The Longest Journey, but I haven't played Dreamfall yet.

*looks at Dreamfall sitting next to the computer*

Perhaps I should open it and play... =)

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

You so should.

It has a bit too much cutscene and a bit too little action for me, but still. So much love.

[sarcasm-hime.livejournal.com]

LOL I'm in the same boat. I was so impatient for Dreamfall to come out, and then I've been too busy to play it. :P

I guess I should go back and re-play TLJ first since it's been years...

The only major issues I had with the game were a) too much talky cutscenes, and b) many of the puzzles were totally nonintuitive and had me resorting to just going through my inventory and using items one at a time, figuring one of them would eventually work.

[haruhiko.livejournal.com]

What you talk about is why I really enjoyed The Eight by Katherine Neville. It's not about passing between a home world and a fantasty world (instead it's two different timelines being part of the same story) but what really made it work for me was the effort to make both timelines "real" and the attention to detail and the author's obvious love for BOTH of the settings she was working with.

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

*puts on list*

[haruhiko.livejournal.com]

YAY!

Hardly anyone I know has read it, despite the fact that it was on my high school's summer reading list for Western/European History.

[buymeaclue.livejournal.com]

I love those games.

And I think this is an excellent realization.

(Have you played Syberia? It's the best game I know. Actual character development. And gorgeous.)

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

I have not! Although I did see its name mentioned in the same breath as TLJ when I was restlessly sifting the internet for more adventure games. If you endorse its awesomeness, I will go out and acquire.

[marydell.livejournal.com]

Syberia is extremely wonderful.

Syberia II, meh.

[buymeaclue.livejournal.com]

Agree with this. Syberia II is very, very pretty and I like it from an "I miss Syberia" standpoint, but it's not the same.

[skwirly.livejournal.com]

I love the Night Threads books. I just hunted down and acquired the second trilogy recently to re-read, as I haven't read them since high school or so (whereas the first trilogy, for some reason, I had more access to and so have re-read a few times).

You're totally right about Emerson's treatment of the dual worlds. It's refreshing to have the characters not be instantly in love with their new world, to have them miss their readily-available modern addictions, and to have them remembering the world they left with regret and love, as opposed to just forgetting about it or going 'gosh, I'm glad we're not in THAT place anymore.' Definitely something to keep in mind if I ever get around to writing something dual-worldy (that's the technical term, right?).

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

It is also refreshing for me to not feel like the only person in the world who ever read those. Thank you. :)

[skwirly.livejournal.com]

Hah, that was my exact reaction when you mentioned them. Somebody else who's read them! FOMG!

[mr-ladouceur.livejournal.com]

The games sound excellent, and I'm really intrigued by the idea of the dual-world story in which both worlds are real and vibrant and not just places to escape from or to.

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

They're completely fantastic. And I'm jooooonesing. :)

[lenora-rose.livejournal.com]

I remember liking the Night Threads books quite a bit (Though reading them when they came out, the first book was a nightmare of a cliffhanger for my teenaged brain).

I remember reading a review of Tom Deitz' Windmaster's Bane which complained that far from the Celtic fantasy world being cool, the best part was by far Georgia and the Appalachian background. I disagreed, but not because the Celtic otherworld was particularly cool; because the tension between the two was the place to be in that sort of world, where, as you say, they both matter.

[theengineer.livejournal.com]

Man, I loved The Longest Journey, but I fell out of games for a while and never got around to getting Dreamfall. Is it still available anywhere? PC games seem to be dying out.

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

I got both games off Steam for something like $25.00. They did a package deal. *g*

[buymeaclue.livejournal.com]

This post made me all nostalgic, so I wandered off to read some Longest Journey reviews and the Wiki article, and OH NO BURNS FLIPPER! I'd forgotten. :(

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

Yeah. :( I mean, he sort of bought that for himself, but...yeah.