Full transcript for Rock Paper Shotgun interview
Introduction
This document is a full transcript of a series of interviews and subsequent discussions between myself and Edwin Evans-Thirlwell about my project My Work is Not Yet Done, which were eventually condensed and published on Rock Paper Shotgun as “How a would-be priest explores the horror of God in videogames”.
While the article does a pretty excellent job parsing a whole lot of information into a much more immediately accessible format, I feel that unfortunately — through nobody’s particular fault — a good deal of the often necessary context and nuance of our conversations was unfortunately lost in translation. The goal of this document is to provide that additional context.
This document is broken into two major sections: the initial interview, and the post-interview discussions. It is also available to read on Google Docs, which offers a full outline of the contents.
I. Initial interview
This was the initial interview, conducted on 17 January 2020. The full audio for the interview is available here, with partial transcriptions of the most relevant sections provided down below. Topics have been grouped by header. Light edits have been made to improve clarity and continuity.
[On the origin of the concept for the game]
Are you talking about the concept of the game [itself], or the ideas behind it? Because the concept for the game… I just took a shit one day in the woods and I realised there weren’t any games that really highlighted that! But talking more about the sort of ideological foundation…
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[…T]he other inspiration [was] the opening [canto] of Dante’s Inferno where, you know, obviously, he’s wandering around this sort of dark wood and he sees these like these animalistic figures, which a lot of people have taken to be metaphorical. You know, that’s probably how they’re intended to be. But everybody always focuses on the latter [sections], the bulk of Dante’s world where it’s dealing with this very peopled version of hell, this sort of social version of hell. But not many people talk about this stage that he was in at the beginning […] The opening lines are typically interpreted to be this… you know, he’s found himself in a place of profound despair. And he’s completely lost. And that metaphor is carried through over into this literal wood, and I wanted to explore that concept.
At some point, I was studying theology with the intention of becoming a priest. And a lot of my work there was sort of rooted around this idea of the sin called acedia, which is a very particular sort of idleness or sloth. The idea of sloth, in its original form, was actually presented in these two forms, which were acedia and tristitia [NOTE: These terms can, depending on who you ask, be used interchangeably to describe similar if not outright identical phenomena. The disambiguation I make here is not universal.]
Tristitia is more like what we would describe today as a depression: it’s a kind of physical and psychic exhaustion that drained monks of their ability to work because, you know, they were sitting in monasteries in the darkness for years on end, which is I imagine not good for anybody’s mental health. Acedia is more of a spiritual or philosophical sort of weariness, where over time, encountering so many different kinds of ideas and interpretations you inevitably come to this question of, “Well, is there actually a god? Do any of these principles hold up?” Which is kind of where Dante is at at the beginning of the Inferno and the Divine Comedy, where he’s very much lost his way, both in the material world and in the spiritual world. I wanted to start from that kind of point.
Everybody knows what happens in the Inferno, and everybody knows what happens afterwards, when he goes through and sees the sort of the aftermath of the material world as it’s present. But I want to explore this sort of liminality within that space with this sense of acedia, which is what happens when you’ve become… I guess a modern term for it would be “alienation”, but alienation has a lot of modern connotations that come with technology, or whatever. [Acedia is] a different kind of alienation, I suppose. It’s an alienation from a self that comes through too much introspection [of a specific kind]. So that’s I guess where the ideological motivation comes from.
[On the idea of a “pilgrimage simulator”]
The trailer uses a very sort of liberally interpreted translation of the opening lines [of Dante’s Inferno], but [the narration is] not actually from the character that you play as. Essentially, the entire narrative arc of the game or the overall narrative of the game is very much planned around a kind of journey, although I wouldn’t compare it to a pilgrimage in the usual sense, which a lot of people interpret to represent [a journey across] vast geographical distances. It’s more of a simultaneous sort of descent and ascent into who [Avery, the central character] is as a person: she’s confronting, for example, all these presumptions, suppositions about her faith — which is faith both in a religious sense, because religion plays a huge role in this world, and faith in a sort of political/existential sense.
[The] characters in this world belong to this sort of monolithic entity called the Empire… [it’s] not a bad place to live at all, but participation within the Empire requires a conjoining of one’s individual existential identity with the existential identity of the Empire. And, as she’s out in this area that’s completely estranged from the Empire’s influence and control, she has to cope with the sort of dissolution of that, the testing of that. In that sense, I’d say it’s a pilgrimage, because not only is she moving towards some potentially inscrutable destination that has, in-universe, these quasi-theological implications, but she’s also moving in a sense, both towards and away from her own faith, and the construction of identity around her faith.
[the influence of Vandermeer/Garland’s Annihilation]
Annihilation was not so much a direct influence [but] I think the thing that stuck out to me most about Annihilation was… there are a lot of stories that involve this kind of process: you know, a team goes out into this sort of wilderness and then they slowly become separated. There’s plenty of horror stories about that in literature and reality and cinema. But I think that Annihilation, both the book and the film, have a kind of mood to them, I suppose, that I think really captures a particular focus on the ecological nature of the areas in which they’re going into. Whereas, you know, something like Stalker, for example, very much focuses on a person’s interior ecology, their psychic ecology.
And I think Annihilation does a good job of sort of conjoining or blurring the boundaries between the external ecology of the flora and fauna with one’s internal ecology. In Annihilation, that sort of thing is much more pronounced, more extreme because of the character’s occupation [as a biologist] and just the way she is. So I don’t want to go that far [to suggest that My Work Is Not Yet Done is heavily influenced by Annihilation], but it’s certainly something that serves as a very solid point of influence. I guess aesthetically, there’s a.. you know, there’s gonna be inevitable comparisons, but actually, those comparisons didn’t really come to me consciously until after I started looking at my own work. And I was basically like, oh, okay, that’s just Annihilation!
[the influence of Lem/Tarkovsky’s Solaris and Stalker]
I’d say my work is much more influenced by Solaris than Stalker. [There’s] the [inevitable] comparison to the Zone and what the Zone does for people in Stalker, I can definitely understand that. But essentially, Solaris is about this team of… I think, they’re scientists or something, and they go to this very distant moon in a spaceship and much of the film is concerned with the ways in which this moon exerts this… some people will say it’s hallucinogenic, but it exerts some kind of presence on them, in which reality begins to slip in the sense that it starts producing duplicates. It becomes this very sort of oneiric… it has a kind of duplicating effect upon people. I think that’s the best way to put it. Or not duplicating, but it strips away the boundaries between, let’s just say like, image and reality, if that makes sense. Where people begin to see like doppelgangers of themselves and stuff like that. And that was actually a much greater point of inspiration, a more direct point of inspiration for my work than Stalker.
Stalker ultimately, at least for me at the end of the day, is not really a film about isolation so much as an isolating process. And I think that, you know, that’s valuable. But for me, I was more interested in the actual effects of isolation and alienation in the long term, which is what Solaris very much deals with. I think the two films also work together really well as a sort of dialogue. Solaris is kind of what Stalker would be like, if it was about people who instead of entering and leaving the zone, [stayed] there for six years or something. It’s a much more sort of long term examination.
[On player-avatar dissonance, and the influence of Darkwood]
It’s ostensibly a similar premise [to Darkwood, which I had mentioned earlier was probably the single biggest influence for this project when it comes to games] where it’s a survival horror experience. The entire thing [Darkwood] uses a direct top-down view, but it still manages to do horror very effectively. I found that to be a very engaging premise, that somebody can take this view that seems almost entirely antithetical to the idea of horror, and still somehow make it very unsettling.
I ended up choosing a sort of three-fourths view. […] One of the larger ideas that I’ve always been interested in as a developer is the dissonance between what the player does and what the character does. We can talk a bit more about this later, but I know something you were interested in was sort of like the psychic effects, you know, or just the idea of the psyche [in the game]. Part of the way that’s reinforced is sort of, you know, the lower the character’s psychic condition becomes, the more she sort of deteriorates, the more she becomes [assimilated] as part of the space, the less control the player will have over her. It’s kind of an ambivalent process.
It’s measured in-game via this thing called willpower. Essentially, the lower her willpower is, [the greater the chance that] she might start refusing what the player tells her to do. There[‘s a chance for these] sort of like blackouts [to occur] where the player will completely lose control, and she’ll just end up in a completely different location.
So essentially, with a three-fourths view, I want to reinforce this idea that the player is more of an observer: they’re kind of a coordinator more than [a controller for] the character herself. A big part of the game is figuring out her feelings based on a [a variety of cues such as] animations, the things she says, the way she talks — noticing signs of slippage. […] Basically I want the player to invest in the character as one would sort of invest in someone in real life. Which is like, you’re not going to be seeing a meter representing someone’s abstracted hunger, so instead, you have to pay attention to what she’s doing.
[…]
Oh, I was talking about the perspective! So, the [three-fourths] perspective sort of reinforces the idea that someone is viewing this from a satellite perspective. You can zoom in and out during the game, and I intentionally added this sort of like very lens-like effect to that, where, you know, when you zoom in and out, it feels and sounds like you’re zooming in via a camera. That was kind of the intention for that…
As for the 1-bit monochrome aesthetic, I chose that really for two main reasons. The first being that it’s just much easier to produce assets in two colours than in multiple colours! I had to shortcut that one. Also, I found that it made it much easier to blend the character into the environment. I’ve gotten some comments that people can’t see what the character’s doing… but in many ways that was kind of intentional. Going back to the point I made earlier about the collapse of the boundary separating one’s internal ecology from the external ecology… I think that everybody who’s seen [the game] in action — maybe the three people who have actually played the game currently, including myself — I think we’d all say that when you’re playing it is generally pretty easy or pretty manageable to keep track of the character on screen. I’m not too concerned at this point at least from a player’s perspective. I think people will just have to trust me on this. It’s very much a part of the gameplay, needing to find the character constantly against the visual noise, the fecundity of the place.
[On resisting stereotypical portrayals of mental health]
That’s definitely a major point of concern. The representation of mental health in general is a very relevant topic for me. I think that I distinguish psychic health from mental health in a critical capacity. I think the language of it [as framed in-game] is my attempt to address that.
A lot of games represent the cumulative condition of a person, and that takes into account a lot of different factors. Games like Don’t Starve, for instance, have sanity metres. For me, that cumulative condition is represented by the idea of willpower. All these things together aren’t necessarily sapping her overall condition, this ambiguous [idea of] condition, but her willpower to continue on. And that plays into the title theme of somebody’s work not being done, so they have no choice but to continue.
There actually is a numerical representation of her psychic state, or not her psychic state, but the amount of psychic trauma she’s endured [although it’s not visible to the player]. The amount of psychic trauma she endures is directly linked to her overall willpower. It’s a multiplier [representing how] certain factors in the game, like injuries, deplete her overall willpower [in a compound fashion].
Whatever she’s feeling internally, there’s a little bit that comes out. […] Depending on how much psychic trauma she’s endured, her responses to things will change. When she thinks things or speaks to the player, some of her responses will become more pessimistic, or she’ll stop noticing certain things, or she’ll start noticing other things. Not necessarily in a hallucinatory way, but she’ll start noticing certain details. For me that’s the best representation I can personally come up with for this kind of thing, because at the end of the day you can only really have somebody’s words to rely on for getting a read of how they’re doing. Just to be fair, I guess, to the character, inasmuch as one can be fair to a character, I think that’s the only thing they can really do.
Originally, she could develop stuff like insomnia or depression. She can still develop things which have symptoms like insomnia, something that prevents you from sleeping, for example, or makes the act of sleeping much more difficult. [But] I didn’t want to give it psychiatric terms, because I feel that kind of both trivialises actual psychiatric conditions, and attaches those features to a pseudo-medical framework that I don’t particularly want to encourage in this fiction.
[Ultimately], the way I chose to represent [mental health] feels to me like a fair compromise, because at the end of the day, you can’t ever really represent somebody’s psychic health or develop a stable metric for it. Any kind of metric [though] is going to be [by necessity] grounded against something, and I chose to ground it [in this case] against the player’s relationship to her, or the player’s ability to control her.
[On the idea of an “excursionary force”, and the kingdom of heaven]
[The term I use in-game] is actually “an expeditionary force”! It’s funny though, I did originally use the word “excursionary”… In any case, yeah, [Avery’s] part of this expedition. The Empire is sort of like I said before, it’s just like this monolithic — it’s not even like a global organization, it’s better to think of it in some sense as like an existential state. And this is something that the Empire itself very much inculcates in its members: the Empire isn’t just a government or a group of people, the Empire is quite literally a state of mind, not to quote the song or anything but yeah.
For a slight detour, I think that the best way to think about it is that there’s this idea in Christianity that, you know, the ultimate goal of Christianity is the establishment of the kingdom of heaven. And in many ways, the Empire is a version of the idea of the kingdom of Earth, the kingdom of Earth being the kingdom of heaven. These two [have become] conjoined forces, where it’s like this Empire, you know, it has such a presence that it effectively has erased all of history. The Empire has the power to completely reshape history, so there’s no other Empire before or after. And so it’s from this place that Avery is coming from. She’s part of this sort of this expeditionary team that’s specifically designed to investigate things that potentially threaten or pose a sort of existential risk to the Empire.
They’re very much concerned with the existence of paranatural phenomena, which is a very big thing in this world. They’re constantly investigating these sorts of openings in the earth where the boundaries of natural law — or not natural law, but the boundaries of expectation of what is called the “natural order” — are breached. They go and investigate these places, and she’s part of […] a specific group that’s assembled to address the issue of this “sinking country”.
The game takes place in a fictionalised version of this national park in Georgia, and the coast has receded significantly by the time the game takes place, so that she’s right up on the edge of the ocean. Georgia is… I don’t know if you know anything about American geography, but there’s maybe a thousand kilometres of receding coastline. [NOTE: Evidently I don’t know much about American geography either… the real number is much closer to around 300km or so, depending on where you decide to measure distance to shore.]
So she’s been sent into this region to investigate this strange signal that’s causing disruptions, and she was originally sent in as part of a four-person team. But the other three people are no longer there for reasons I suppose that the game will answer (or maybe not!). The game starts just after the third person has gone, and now she’s just alone and she’s been here for like, maybe a month or two, and she has to figure out what to do. Does she continue with their mission? Or does she abandon it, just live it out? It’s a very open-ended game in that sense. The idea of whether to respect both one’s external and in some sense internal mission, regardless of whether you still have connection to that original source.
[On Ligotti, and his identically-named work]
I don’t know if you’ve read [Ligotti’s My Work Is Not Yet Done] but it’s essentially grounded in this idea of cosmic horror [of] the corporation, a kind of monolithic fear that we typically associate with eldritch gods. There is an element of bureaucratic inscrutability to the game, but it’s more of an oblique reference. I think the thing the book does very well, proves very well is that cosmic horror doesn’t have to be grounded in the Lovecraftian approach, which I personally really do not like for a number of reasons. The aesthetic can be grounded in something more — in the case of the book — social, such as a corporation. Or in my case, something pseudo-ecological. There’s immense horror to be found in the natural world and just the idea of wilderness. A lot of people are like, “oh, what if what if we went into the sky and into space or whatever: surely there must be horrifying things.” And sure, no doubt it’s fucking horrifying out there. But there’s plenty of that kind of stuff to be found down here.
[On empire]
It’s not really possible to talk about [the nature of the Empire’s power] without mentioning the underlying importance of the theological element within the construction. I probably won’t go into too much detail about it right now, but essentially the Empire was founded by an almost Christ-like figure, a figure that’s now considered messianic, who emerges in the world and with them they bring these immense powers — maybe godlike is not the right word — but they wage absolute fucking destruction upon the earth in its present form. And the Empire sort of emerges from the lineage of that, both directly and spiritually, where a lot of its power lies not just in controlling resources or anything but […] its particular sensitivity to the natural ecology, if you will: man’s relationship to the earth in ways that present industries very much deny.
[…]
They say that every empire’s control ultimately comes down to how well it can keep its citizens fed. A lot of empires in fiction are depicted as… the source of their power is military, it’s oppressive. I want to explore the idea of a utopian empire, of empire as a utopian concept. The idea of utopia kind of died out with the Nazis, since they were arguably one of the last major sort of utopian movements, who actually came to power and did something with it, and you know, everybody knows how that turned out…
So I think that people are very wary of utopia, you don’t see it much in fiction, or at least at mass scale, but I wanted to explore the idea of… what if the kingdom of heaven on earth were to actually be established? What would it look like, where would it derive its power from? So much of the misery in the current world comes from the inability to keep people fed and housed; I thought it’d be fitting and interesting for this empire to derive almost all of its power from its ability to sustain everybody’s daily living. Ultimately I believe that in some sense the Empire here is genuinely a benevolent force of some kind. But I’m also very interested in exploring the ways in which that kind of benevolence is very intentionally constructed. I don’t know, I guess I don’t want to be cynical. But I do want to explore the implications of that on a social level.
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I think [My Work Is Not Yet Done] doesn’t deal that much with the sort of… I don’t want to say political, but I guess just for lack of a better word, the political exploration of [the concept of identity in relation to the Empire]. That is something I definitely want to explore in later games, and I have a bunch of stuff already written for… maybe not the next one, but something down the line that very much deals with the idea of becoming dissociated from or disconnected from the Empire at least in its most obvious [political and social] form.
There’s this idea that in this universe, the Empire is quite literally everything and everything is the Empire, including that which is not part of the Empire. Empire [in general] is very much defined by the elements that resist it as much as it is defined by the elements contained directly within it. So that is something I want to explore later. But for this game, this sort of dissociation is less about a political sort of existentialism in the Empire as it is an interrogation of its role [in the natural world]. I wouldn’t go so far as to say outright “disenchantment”, but definitely, there’s a kind of sustained interrogation of the idea that all, you know, the Empire truly is all of reality.
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The next iteration of this [series of ideas] that I’m interested in is effectively a direct exploration of the present history of the Empire. In the past several years, they’ve been undergoing not so much a kind of civil war, but a minor [civil] conflict within their [home] region. And it’s from this conflict that Avery is actually coming. She’s a veteran of this conflict, but unlike, you know, modern conflict where so much of it is combat-oriented, the Empire’s ideology is that they seek to assimilate people [rather than dominate them, and much of its work and understanding of things like conflict and violence is more cultural/symbolic than literal]. They don’t want to just outright destroy people, that’s their last resort. The Empire never kills people. They don’t have a military, they don’t have a traditional military force. Avery’s coming from [a conflict] against this group that’s, at least in [how it’s presented in this next potential] game, this sort of nascent pseudo-religious group that’s very much inspired by some of my issues with Metal Gear Solid. That’s one of these groups that pose an existential threat, a political counter-argument to the Empire. But we’ll save that for a later game…
[On genre conventions]
I want to contribute a title to the survival genre that’s very much focused on the physical act and feeling of surviving, rather than just the guise of surviving. [So, in a sense, on] the very literal act of surviving on a microscopic level. That ties back into what I was saying about maintaining that critical distance between the character and the player. So at any given point, you’re not surviving as the player, it’s not you playing; [instead] the player coordinates a number of actions by observing Avery and basically figuring out that she’s hungry, or needs a piss. I guess the other way of putting it is that I want to put the survival back in survival horror; that’s what I tell myself personally. But I don’t say that kind of stuff out loud in public, because it kind of makes people mad!
[On horror]
It does not take much to scare me at all. I genuinely consider jump scares very, very effective. But some of the most horrifying moments in my life have come out of… I don’t do it so much these days, but […] I used to go on these very long walks. And some of the most horrifying moments in my life have come out of just sitting out there, just noticing things that seem, in a Mark Fisher sense, very weird or very eerie. Just the feeling of having to get up in the middle of the night to go the bathroom is potentially traumatizing.
A lot of the horror draws from things that personally really frightened me. So the example that comes to mind for me, is this one time I was out maybe 30 or 40 kilometers into a reservation [near] where I lived [at the time]. And, you know, it’s like 30 kilometers out, there’s no infrastructure around, there’s no cell signal, there’s nothing, not even much of a trail left. I hadn’t encountered anybody for a couple hours. And then all of a sudden, like, as I sit down — like, I’m just sitting down on this rock and I suddenly noticed a beer bottle, lying beneath the rock. No other sign of human beings, just a single fucking beer bottle, just sitting here. And in that moment, I just felt this wave of fucking immense horror wash over me. I felt like I was being watched by something. It was a very disrupting moment.
I think that kind of feeling is something that you can’t really understand until you’ve encountered something similar, finding yourself an environment in which you don’t expect to see something, and then you see it. Or you expect to see something but you don’t. And that’s where a lot of my horror comes from, I think. There’s also plenty of uncomfortable imagery in the game, let me put it like that. But I consider that kind of horror to be lesser to that sort of existential horror.
[Is the horror more from a sense of incongruity, or finding an artefact with a purpose?]
It’s a combination of both those things, as well as the entire shattering, I guess, of an expectation. The bottle looked pretty recent, as well, it still had some liquid in it, so somebody had been here relatively recently. That combination of total isolation in the environment, the fact that I was off the trail, the fact that like, I just hadn’t seen anybody and therefore had gotten into this kind of mindset… it was a very chilling moment in some ways.
It’s like when you have a particularly grainy photo, like those urban legend photos, where it’s like, “oh, look, there’s a ghost in the background”. And at first you don’t see anything and then you look into a dark corner and suddenly see a tiny smattering of pixels that might look like a face. And now you can’t stop thinking about it, you can’t stop seeing it. It’s this idea of the fact that any given moment in our lives, it could be some kind of presence that’s just cohabiting with us: not even with sinister intent, but it’s just there and we have no idea. And that’s fucking terrifying to me.
[Where does the player factor into the sense of horror?]
There’s two kinds of horror [at work], I think. The player doesn’t know about the things they see in the environment, but the character might understand them because it’s her occupation, she primarily deals with these very strange occurrences. Her training has involved undergoing these incredibly disturbing, psychically intense experiences in which she’s conditioned against fear as much as possible. So things that disrupt the player may not necessarily disrupt her.
But she can also recognize things in the environment which she may not tell the player about. Something that may be completely unrecognizable to the player she’ll just look at and feel nothing or she’ll recognize it [but say nothing]. I want the player to distrust her a little bit. Later when her willpower, which sort of represents her connection to the player, starts to deteriorate, she’ll start to do things that are against or even entirely independent of the player’s agency.
I guess the easy way of putting this would be that she’s an unreliable narrator. I kind of wanted to reinforce the horror of this idea… “What does this character know that I don’t?” […] As the game progresses the character herself, if the player chooses to play [a certain] way, becomes alien to the player, in the sense that she becomes more a part of the environment. She becomes more accustomed to the strange logic of this place [ — but the player is left behind.]
[On mechanics of interaction and UI]
I’d say that [Avery] has possibly three, depending on how you like to mix categories and nuances, ways of communicating with the player.
The first is just sort of like, you know, the general status, like status quotes or whatever, [communicating very immediate sensations like the need to drink or piss].
[Then there’s a second mode] where […] if you like, hold down the right mouse button, you can look at various things and she’ll say, like, okay, “that’s a rock” or “that’s a building”, and she’ll try to guess the purpose of the building.
And [the third is that] she has a sort of journal, which is the game’s way of saving. So every time the player wants to save, they have to [physically] type out a log. It’s a deliberate attempt to create a kind of manual [engagement] on the player’s part. […] They have to type out this log which they will be reading as both they and the character are typing it out. And that will reveal things, similar to the way Red Dead Redemption does it: stuff that she doesn’t say otherwise would be revealed through this.
[She then must go back to the outpost to upload the log to a central server, which on the player’s end is when the game is actually saved.]
My intention was to make the act of saving a very laborious process. I didn’t want the player to just rest to save at any time. It gives the player an incentive to come back to the outpost over and over again, as the character herself would do, rather than giving you the opportunity to game the system by having her walk in a particular direction till she inevitably progresses in the plot overall. Which is definitely something that people can do, but I don’t want to incentivise that kind of behaviour.
[…]
I want to basically model it as similarly as possible to the way people communicate in real life. So like, even if you have a puppet, you don’t know what the puppet’s thinking.
[On religion]
That’s definitely the source of all my stuff.
Sometimes [my approach is] more direct, sometimes not, but [all my work] comes down to these fundamental questions that are ultimately of theological nature. So a lot of what I’m concerned about is, you know, the idea of maintaining faith in spite of testing conditions or circumstances. Or like, the idea of unconditional love. Essentially, what would the ideal of this be like?
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I guess when I try to process theological questions nowadays on a personal level, I try my best to phrase it in a way that’s not necessarily secular, but in a way that can be applied in a more humanistic sense. And because a lot of people these days are very cynical — for very good reasons — about the language and sort of terminology of religion — and I don’t blame them for that — but I think that ultimately, religion, at least in its — I don’t want to say intended, but at least in a certain vision of religion of there’s still a lot of value to be found, in the consolatory and, what’s it called… clarifying nature of how the process works. Because at the end of the day, you know, theology as a discipline is very much a process of working with logic, the same as philosophy or even the traditional sciences. […]
I think theology at the end of the day for me, is just the process in which one works through an understanding of the world and your place in it. And I think it has a unique edge over something like you know, the STEM understanding of science, where that only focuses on a very material and objectifying way of looking at the world, whereas I think theology is able to handle the questions of the individual subjectivity within the grand scheme of things better.
All my works again deal with these questions — obviously religion plays a huge role in the actual construction of the game world which is something I’m very interested in hearing more people talk about, especially people who are like, you know, raised that way. I was not raised religious. My family came from the Communist era of China, a very transitional period when religion was seen as a very negative [phenomenon]. So, you know, it’s a very different experience, parsing questions of faith and questions of theological importance between someone who chose essentially to engage with that dimension of life, versus someone who had no choice, someone who went to Catholic school their entire childhood. So, you know, I’m interested to hear what people say about that. I think that’s the part that I’m most looking forward to hearing about, when it comes to the sort of the reception of the game, the critical discussion.
And I guess on a last note, or as a sort of overarching note: I do suffer admittedly from theological uncertainty. The major reason why I didn’t go through with religion as an occupation was that I never really could feel certain that I actually believed in something. People would ask me: oh, so are you Christian? And I’d be like, well, you know, I don’t really know. I don’t know how to answer that. I don’t want to say yes, because saying just outright “yes” doesn’t feel right to me from a religious perspective, or from an ethical philosophy. But I also can’t say no, because I do certainly think about this a lot more and like this is this kind of stuff is like very profoundly relevant both towards the things that I aim for and aspire for myself and others, and the things that I derive you know, immense horror from.
II. Post-interview
This interview took place between 11 February and 6 March 2020, and constitutes a number of follow-up discussions mostly aimed at clarifying certain elements of my personal background. Much of the article linked in the introduction draws heavily from this series of conversations in particular. Edwin’s questions have been preserved by and large in their entirety, and are represented with headers and in bold. This section is, with the exception of several spelling fixes and header breaks for continuity’s sake, entirely unedited.
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RPS is particularly keen to hear about the game being a kind of continuation of the thinking that once led you toward the priesthood — you’re kind of carrying those inquiries forward into the field of art.
With that in mind, I have a few more questions just to fill that side of the conversation out. Obviously don’t feel obliged to answer if I’m getting too personal!
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Can you tell me more about the formation and development of your feelings about faith and religion? Were you quite a firm believer when you were younger? What denomination exactly did you adhere to?
I largely arrived at religion through my own accord: my family, who grew up in an era in China during which religion was seen as not only irrelevant, but inherently dangerous to society, viewed all religion as “poisonous bullshit”; and the area in which I grew up was basically secular in a pretty typical American neoliberal fashion, where questions of church-going and “faith” in a higher power were operative in a mostly social sense. For a long time, I actually was pretty hostile to the idea of religion in general but particularly Abrahamic religion; most of my antagonism was informed entirely by a sense of profound cynicism and bitterness however, and although I did have some experience reading the Bible, I focused exclusively on the negative aspects of it: the calamity and carnage and wrath of the Old Testament, divorced of all context. I spent most of my time reading a lot of philosophy and theory — probably not with any particular nuance, to be fair — and in general, I thought myself above the influence of the church, which I figured to be an irrelevant and obsolete institution in the modern age, and God seemed too distant of a concept for me to care. The future seemed infinite back then and I didn’t care much about anything, and wanted to fight back against everyone: I did a lot of drugs that didn’t make me feel great just because no one else dared, told a bunch of lies I didn’t really mean just to create an image of a life I did not want, had sexual relations with a lot of people I didn’t really like just because I could, got into a bunch of fights I didn’t really need to fight just so I could hit someone; and in general lived entirely enthralled to this kind of moronic adolescent bravado and shamelessness whose consequences I’m still trying to untangle and move past to this day.
I can’t really tell you if there was any particular profound moment of revelation to serve as an impetus for my interest in religion. The truth is, I think I was just getting tired of the way I was living my life, but I couldn’t find any other way out, and for all the shit I was reading, none of it really seemed to offer any kind of consolation. If there was any particular moment which served as a kind of tipping point thought I can remember this one afternoon distinctly when I was just sitting on the beach with my friend and she was saying something to me, something utterly mundane and inconsequential, and I was looking at the sky — it was kinda just overcast and flat, nothing special, no miraculous meteorological anomalies that day — not really listening to her, just staring out towards the perimeter where the sea seemed to meet the sky and wondering if there was anything out there; and suddenly I was struck by this profound sense of coldness and acute loneliness. Everything got very bright all of a sudden, and then very dim, and I felt utterly alone and insignificant in the world, like all my actions would just evaporate. There was this kind of immense presence passing over me — the overwhelming terror that the sea was reaching out to devour me, each dark wave lurching closer and closer; or maybe it was the sensation of the sky looming over me, the clouds shifting and rapidly descending to crush me beneath their weight — and I felt completely immobilised. It was a very brief moment in reality but it felt like it went on forever.
In all likelihood, I probably just experienced some kind of vague psychotic episode, which was not at all abnormal at the time given the kind of lifestyle I was living; but in the moment it felt positively tidal in a strange way. I don’t know why I picked up a Bible when I got home; up until that point I’d never particularly been interested in the idea of the divine, and I certainly didn’t view the incident — either at the time, or in retrospect — as any kind of act of divine providence or anything like that. Maybe it was just because I happened to be reading a lot of Kierkegaard around that time, and for whatever reason his theology in particular stood out to me as uniquely compelling: how uniquely personal and internal it presented both the presence and process of God, especially in contrast to the more systematic and systemic exteriorised understanding of God held by his contemporaries. For whatever reason God all of a sudden no longer seemed so remote of a concept to contemplate.
As for why Christianity in particular: I imagine a large part of it was convenience, but also, I think that even if I hadn’t been born in a national culture so heavily steeped in the language and, at least in the most nominal sense, ethical framework of Christianity, I still would have inevitably found myself attracted to it at some point. While most, if not all, systems of faith suffer from internal contradictions and confusions by virtue of their intended goal to interface the human with the divine, Christianity is particularly plagued by these kinds of things, and its history and documentation offers a view of an extraordinarily complex and internally inconsistent system of beliefs, simultaneously authoritarian and liberatory, centralised and rhizomatic, petty and profound, esoteric and universal. I’ve always lived my life vacillating between extremities of expression and belief — maybe because it’s my astrological fate as the wretched Libra, permanently imbalanced; maybe just because I just suffer from a restless yet agoraphobic sense of self — and Christianity was the only system that really managed to speak to me in all its tremendous conflicts of faith and interpretation. For most people who commit apostasy and renounce the validity of, say, the Bible, or become disillusioned with the idea of God, the most common points of departure seem to be focused around the Bible’s many discrepancies and “errors”: why should we trust the Word of God, as it might be, if it’s so riddled with such obvious gaps in continuity? But for me, that fickleness and inconstancy, the errancy and interpretive mutability of the Word, was the exact thing that attracted me to it.
When and how were you studying to become a priest? Can you say more about why you decided it wasn’t for you — where did your uncertainties about Christianity come from?
I initially chose to become a priest rather naively — because everybody had started applying to colleges and talking about “the future”, whatever that meant, around that time, and I didn’t want to just become another CS or finance major like everyone else — but, having stated that goal with some conviction to a number of people but most importantly myself, I started seriously dedicating myself to it, lacking any better choices at that time (the only other appealing choice was to go into the games industry, which at the time seemed basically like a pipe dream). At that point, I was pretty interested and well-read in theology, wanted to do some kind of job that could directly help other people or improve their lives in some way, and people were always telling me I was reasonably good at talking people through difficult things and explaining difficult concepts in approachable ways; so priesthood seemed like an appealing option.
I doubled down on my Latin studies and took up some classical Greek and Hebrew, and began sitting in (well, unofficially anyways) on graduate classes at NYU, where I started engaging with a lot more interesting topics in a considerably more rigorous fashion than I was used to prior. The programme there was focused on Religious Studies, which I had naively mistaken as theology, and was a lot more academic in focus, drawing just as much from critical theory as from exegesis and hermeneutics. Once I felt I’d acquired enough of a theoretical background (or probably more honestly, around the time people started getting suspicious of my previously-assumed identity as an NYU student), I started looking at seminaries, which is the first step towards ordainment, and eventually decided to sit in on some open houses to check out what they were all about. That was just about the time I realised there was a pretty big problem: I wasn’t actually sure if I believed in God, or just the idea of God.
Up until that point, my experience with religion was entirely solitary: God was always something I experienced alone. My family had never gone to church but many of my friends’ families had gone nearly every weekend throughout their lives, so I was always curious about the experience. The first time I attended service — at my girlfriend’s local church for Sunday mass my senior year of high school — I left feeling vaguely sick and angered by the sheer platitudinal mediocrity of it all: the rote exchanging of pleasantries, the limp singing of songs, the uninspired sermonising. Perhaps I’m being too harsh on it in reality but the overall sensation I was left with was one of overwhelming disappointment: this was not the experience I’d envisioned religion to be, this kind of spectacularly unremarkable and perfectly adequate performance of rites. I couldn’t fit in with anyone there, either their social community or their shared sense of mild religious responsibility, and as time went on I discovered more and more that that feeling would be reiterated repeatedly in the years to come.
I felt uncomfortable calling myself a Christian, which in most people’s minds would align me with the kinds of people who tag the name of Christ onto nearly every sentiment like a psychic tic, who believe without any examination in things like the power of prayer or the literal infallibility of the Bible. But at the same time I also knew for certain that I cared about these kinds of issues with a degree of intensity a bit more pronounced than the average individual, so to call myself “agnostic” or whatever felt like a kind of cop-out, a rejection of my own interests. The result was that I didn’t know where I belonged, I couldn’t find any order to fit in with — a common refrain in my life, echoed in nearly every aspect of my identity — and as a result I became alienated from all of it, growing increasingly lonely in the practice and investigation of my faith, to the point where it became maladaptive and misanthropic.
I always tell people that one of the major reasons why I struggled with the practicalities of priesthood, with its insistence upon declaration and affirmation of institutional allegiance, was that I was never able to formally identify with any denomination: that the primary issue that led to my choice to abandon priesthood, was that, despite much of my theoretical foundation being built upon a catholic, deeply mystic understanding of guilt and witness, authority and alienation; in practice, I found the nature of the church as an institution and its practice of dogma deeply unappealing and in some ways even irreligious, which are sentiments that make one on a strictly ethical and administrative level pretty obviously unsuitable for priesthood. That’s probably just a cover-up, though; the more likely truth behind why I turned away from priesthood is because I was simply unable to cope with my intense personal alienation not from my faith itself; but from the experiences and lives of other people, and the ongoing concomitant feelings of frustration and resentment I experience constantly as a result of that failure. How could I pretend to console someone on matters that I found to be fundamentally flawed in premise alone, whose ways of viewing the world I found wholly unrelatable and even anathema to my own? The same way the measure of a good teacher lies not in their ability to recite from memory impressive technical passages, or identify the specific linguistic mechanisms and nuances that separate one translation of a text from another, but in their ability to inspire in their students a love of learning and one another, and a desire to engage with the world; so too is the measure of a good priest their ability to inspire in their congregation a love of God and one another, and a desire to engage with the world. With that being said, someone who holds others in contempt or looks down upon them simply because their lifestyles and philosophies differ — however much they attempt to conceal it — cannot be trusted to responsibly provide good counsel, especially of the spiritual kind.
At one point you talked about the horror of realising you aren’t quite alone, however alone you might feel — “at any given moment in our lives, it could be some kind of presence that’s just cohabiting with us — not even with sinister intent, but it’s just there and we have no idea”. Setting aside secular and/or existentialist interpretations, is there a theological dimension to that horror? Could you be describing fear of God as something omnipresent, watchful and unknowable?
I think when people traditionally talk about the “fear of God”, what they’re actually talking about — which makes sense, given the kinds of structures in which these faiths developed — is the fear of authority, where God is the ultimate authority in the Old Testament sense, capable of punishing anyone anywhere, of peering into our minds and discerning our intentions, uncovering all manners of sinful thoughts and things we don’t even know about ourselves yet.
The thing is though, I grew up under constant surveillance. My door had no lock and my father could and would enter at any given point for inspections; my time on the computer was heavily restricted to one-hour segments, during which a screen capture tool would take a snapshot every other minute or so and upload it into a log somewhere along with my entire browsing history; my father often threatened to (and sometimes actually did) cut off the hot water to my room or block my devices from the wifi if I “wasted my time” or “did bad things”. As long as I can remember, everything I did which could potentially have an effect on my “future” — the food I ate, how I spent my money, even the classes I took in university and what I studied — was strictly maintained under the authority and regulation of others. For a really long time I hated it and actively tried to do whatever I could to resist it or escape from it; but eventually I came to realise that without it, I actually felt even worse, as all of a sudden my life seemed to lack a sense of structure and order that by that point felt almost necessary.
All of this is to say that I think I’ve always lived my entire life with the expectation that there’d be some kind of authoritative shadow looming over me at any given moment, ready to strike me down with or without apparent cause. In many ways, I feel that it’s actually empowered me in many ways: I’ve lived so long under the threat of an all-seeing eye that I no longer feel threatened by it or its machinations, and in letting go of that fear, I’ve found the confidence to become fully transparent, to commit myself fully to my actions and beliefs despite knowing that there might be figures lurking in the shadows waiting to undermine and disenfranchise me, to expose me as a fraud, to dig up my past as a weapon against me. I do not fear God as an institution because institutions are made for and by human hands and at the end of the day, the worst they can do — which is still pretty fucking horrible, don’t get me wrong — is render meaningless the existence of individual lives. An institution can surround your house with men with guns and gas you, they can drag you out and cut you and your friends into small pieces with handsaws and melt you in stacks of tires, they can leech your entire lifeline dry with unending reams of legal bullshit and doom everyone you love into irredeemable debt; but their authority over you at the end of the day is limited by your flesh, and your ability to endure pain.
The God I truly fear though is the one whose works I cannot even begin to imagine, let alone understand. God for me is that indescribable feeling of inertia which drags me to the edge of a cliff, the immense and inexplicable urge to tip forward just a little bit, enough so that I lose balance and plummet forward; God’s the impenetrable blackness just beyond the reach of the porch lights weakly illuminating the edges of the forest in my backyard, the vast and sudden swell of dread I feel when I’m sitting alone in my room at night and suddenly I happen to catch a vague, blurry glimpse of myself in the reflection of my monitor. In any of these cases, I suppose you could make the argument that the sense of fear arises as a kind of assumed antecedent to some premonition of physical danger — the very real threat of falling off a cliff, the possibility that there’s some kind of predator in the woods I can’t see, the fear that I might see someone standing behind me in the reflection — but I personally believe that the true source of the horror lies in the moment just before the onset of physical terror, when we come face to face with a very present absence which we will never be able to identify. There’s been a lot of interest especially recently with the idea of horror on a cosmic level — the unknowable and incomprehensible, the unstoppable eldritch that defies logic and reason and scientific knowledge, which is abound with impossible contradictions and inconsistencies — but that fear is nothing new. I think only recently have we as a species begun to remember what it feels like to be threatened by something entirely beyond our control, to feel utterly powerless against something which exists beyond the works of human hands, but, having abandoned the institution of religion, we have to instead turn to pop culture for a kind of (well, at least in my opinion) inferior and materialistic language and iconography in order to process our collective sense of despair and helplessness. The sublime though, after all, is only ever able to exist as a faint echo of the divine; and by limiting our language and scope of understanding to the secular and materialistic (of which I still would very much classify the aesthetic), I believe we are throttling our ability as a whole to negotiate our relationship to this tilted world.
Your discussion of cosmic horror as a stand-in for religious horror rings very true for me. I don’t know if you’ve read any Timothy Morton, but his concept of the hyperobject may be useful? Something of incohere-able scale/occupying a different order of being, yet troublingly entangled with day-to-day activities such as turning a tap, or using a plastic comb.
I’m pretty familiar with Morton’s work and especially the theory surrounding hyperobjects; while I wasn’t directly influenced by it. it’s definitely an interesting and viable perspective to consider and I imagine that whole body of dark ecology in both theory and art in recent years most definitely has casted a long shadow, no pun intended, over this work whether I realise it or not.
I also strongly relate to the section about being drawn to textual inconsistency — vaguely paraphrasing Benjamin on constellations, I think texts attain a certain powerful and specifically material life when they are unresolved and self-contradictory. Just some quick thoughts, anyway.
Yeah, the parallel to Benjamin’s relativity is very apt! I’ve always seen nearly all texts as discursive, where it’s basically one person saying to another, “hey, this is something I experienced and this is how I felt about it, did you feel this way too”; it really helps to ground what would otherwise seem hopelessly abstract and alienated from reality back into the world that we understand, where all things exist ultimately only as far as we can experience them, either alone or together; much of my work aspires to that level of honesty where the transparency isn’t just about technical processes or workflows or whatever, but a kind of enduring attempt to reach out across this immense gap that exists first between author and audience, which is then exacerbated by medium and interface, which is then exacerbated by culture and language, etc etc ad nauseam until someone can just really finally get what you’re trying to say, on a really basic human level, and be like, “hey, I too feel this way”
[…] With regard to your thoughts on transparency and honesty: it strikes me that one way MWINYD goes about being honest is by refusing to overlook any of the gaps you describe, almost but not quite to the point of incorporating them into the fiction (in the casting of the player as a semi-literal camera). I’m very curious to explore this in the game.
I’ve now submitted a draft and the editors really like it, but they’ve given me a couple of things to follow up on.
Can you tell me a little about how The Document of Midnight Animal and The Exegesis of John the Martyr fit into your exploration of faith and divinity? I apologise for not asking about them during the original interview — I pitched this as a piece about the new game rather than yourself, and I wasn’t sure you’d want to discuss that work as (going by the Eurogamer piece) it sounds like there’s a lot of turmoil involved. But it would be good to get some sense of how those and any other previous projects anticipate what you’re doing in MWINYD.
The premise of the original Midnight Animal followed what was essentially a glorified bureaucrat with a licence to kill who’s sent by his employer, a major pharmaceutical company, to investigate the proliferation of a new street drug (which goes by the titular Midnight Animal) which causes people to lose sense of themselves and become extraordinarily violent or deranged. The game took place several decades after a post-nuclear America (which is how Hotline Miami 2 ends), and a lot of my interest in the game was exploring what that kind of post-catastrophe world would look like: this kind of corporate technofeudalism where a handful of syndicates reign over megacities, and the skies are constantly scorched with ash, and the waters run blood-red with algal blooms following ecological devastation. The twist was that eventually the character would discover that not only was this drug actually manufactured by the very company he works for but that its effects are in fact psychic rather than pharmacological, where essentially it’s a primer designed weaken the normal psychic boundary in people’s minds, thus making them susceptible to becoming transmitters for this alien signal that the company had uncovered decades prior (which was the real trigger for the initial blast which was mistaken for a nuclear detonation, kickstarting the global holocaust that ends Hotline Miami 2).
I think a lot of MA’s story, which was fundamentally about absolute impotence in the face of inscrutable catastrophe — the main character’s inability to come to terms with his own role as an agent of tremendous violence, the company’s futile attempts to negotiate with an entire realm of knowledge that they have no ability or frankly even language to comprehend, the entire so-called apocalypse in both the common and more linguistically literal understanding of the term having been precipitated by what is essentially a linguistic failure, etc — emerged out of my own feelings of desperate uselessness, which Nic’s article does an excellent job of providing a context for. While that feeling didn’t manifest in or out of any particularly theological lines of thinking at the time, at least not consciously, it definitely was all-encompassing enough to serve as a pretty decent shorthand for how I felt about my faith in general at that point, which was deeply fatalistic and defeatist.
The two works that emerged directly out of all that — The Document of Midnight Animal, and The Exegesis of John the Martyr — were both excessively formal works that were largely made out of spite and ego, although they were dramatically and almost diametrically different in aim. Unfortunately, due to the circumstances of their production, the intent of both has largely been compromised, and as a direct result I feel the actual resulting products don’t at all adequately represent what I intended with them at the time (and are frankly pretty embarrassing from a technical perspective, if I have to be honest…)
Document was basically a counterargument to everyone who claimed I had somehow lost my way or that I didn’t know what I was doing as a game designer. It’s not really an interesting project in any meaningful capacity beyond that.
The Exegesis of John the Martyr is a project that I definitely plan on returning to some day, but for now I’ll speak about it only relative to its past form. It was a two-part multimedia work: one part was the game, which uses a largely traditional VN-style format to tell the story of an inquisitor who’s tasked with investigating a series of disturbing incidents with potentially apocalyptic implications; and the other part was a written text, which includes both a direct transcript of the game’s textual content as well as an increasingly expansive series of extradiegetical footnotes, commentary, and marginalia which eventually reveal another story about the death of the author of the Exegesis as a text-within-a-text, and his friend’s attempts at coping with the meaning, or lack thereof, behind that.
As I mentioned in one of our previous conversations I’ve long been fascinated with the idea of inconstancy in texts and the liquid nature of interpretations, especially in regards to works that are regarded as immutable in some sense: the Exegesis was my first real attempt at trying to create a narrative that would on every level — including the level of my own life — fold in upon itself. A martyr is, etymologically, a witness; its profundity as a religious term came later as the martyrs were all in some way the ultimate kinds of witnesses, who gave their lives for their knowledge (or perhaps knowledge is too weak a term for what they discovered). I wanted to really examine the implications of that idea — what it means to truly bear witness to something, and the textual and personal legacies of that witnessing, and how in time the two processes become fundamentally intertwined so that one’s meaning and even creation becomes inseparable from the other — and in a more literary sense, a lot of it was a projection of me attempting to grapple with my own existential responsibilities as an author: both as creator and as witness, simultaneously transcribing a vision that did not feel like it was mine while writing into form a kind of subreality I could not inhabit.
So on one level, you have the eponymous character John, who’s transcribing his witnessing of what is essentially a kind of apocalypse in motion (which itself is being revealed to him in several echoing layers via a number of in-universe mechanisms); then you have the author of The Exegesis of John the Martyr, who has ostensibly written this work as well as a substantial amount of commentary, some of which strangely differs substantially from the contents of John’s narrative; then you have the author’s friend, who is trying to piece all of this together in an almost editorial position so that they can understand what happened to their friend; then you have the actual author, which is ostensibly me, etc, ad nauseam… But the point is that all of that becomes at some cyclical and collapses in upon itself, which has become a kind of cliché of postmodernism nowadays. My goal though was — is — to reclaim the sovereignty of the individual voice from what would otherwise just seem like random abstraction, and find the humanity within each one of the authors.
As a slightly better example probably: when we speak of the Book of Revelation, we’re also speaking of the Revelation to John on the island of Patmos; but who was John? His identity doesn’t matter anymore to us as readers and what we know about him — if anything — is irrelevant to our ability to appreciate his records of what he saw; but what must it have felt like to him in the moment? That’s not to say that I consider my work revelatory or stemming from anything close to a divine source in the slightest — in fact I very much feel my work is hopelessly grounded in the social and the material — but I became very interested in exploring that process of revelation as a kind of witnessing (and apocalypse as a kind of revelation or uncovering) and in the meantime I quickly found myself becoming trapped in this kind of cycle of endless creative revelation and transcription, a witness to something that felt both within me and beyond me.
To frame this in a broader and less immediately selfish sense: I think that the Exegesis is where I really began to consider faith as THE core theme of all my work moving forward. The subtitle of the Exegesis — “A Story of Love and Forgetting” — was always misinterpreted to be a kind of surface-level indication of the presence of stereotypical romance plotlines or whatever (which were never really intended to be an element); but in reality those two things, constantly in tension, are what I think forms the fundamental dynamic behind faith in general. That is to say: faith is a constant negotiation between the idea of love, and the act of forgetting. If someone bears witness to something they find meaningful without anyone else around, without being able to record it — what happens when they’re gone? Who’s to say they were ever there at all? The only bulwark we have against that kind of age-old curse of time, the devourer of all things, is the love we can find for and within one another: sure, the romantic sense works, but also in the compassionate sense, in the platonic sense, and ultimately in the divine sense, where love becomes this thing that can transcend the limitations of history itself, that can endure beyond memory and human understanding. The Exegesis at its heart, for all its academic pretensions and whatnot, was fundamentally intended to be about the importance of finding one’s faith in the face of a certain kind of oblivion, and enduring beyond that: about how the act of telling stories and bearing witness to and of each other is the only way we will survive our own apocalypses, personal or otherwise. I think that at the end of the day that’s what all of my works are about actually: love as a bulwark against forgetting, finding within ourselves the ability to trust our records to another..
It would also be good to know when and why you started thinking of a career in game development. Apologies — had I known I was writing something comparable to a profile, I’d have started with these questions!
Not entirely sure how you prefer this to be answered, but I’ve spent a lot of time talking about the more philosophical bases behind a lot of my decisions so I’ll frame this more practically. Up until about a year ago making games as a career was basically unthinkable for me. Nearly all of my prior experience was spent effectively as a modder using assets from HM (the Exegesis was a custom engine but I still largely considered it to fall under my work as a modder), so I never felt like that counted as actual “work” in any meaningful sense. Earlier, I had harboured ambitions to eventually work in AAA — that’s more or less why I pushed MA in a public sense so much back when I first began, because I thought it’d serve as a good portfolio piece — but over time I realised I just didn’t have what it takes to work in that kind of environment, and that my resume would basically would never cut it. For some time, with the encouragement of people I trusted, I strongly considered becoming an academic, but that was rather quickly put to an end after I failed to get into a single one of the programmes to which I applied. Over the next few months I drifted in and out of a variety of service and labour jobs, all of which I was very much not cut out for and unwelcome in, before settling into a state of NEETdom for the next year.
Having failed at virtually every single thing I’d attempted at that point and with no further ambitions or visions of the future beyond the inevitable impending impecunity once my parents’ patience wore out, I just kinda drifted in this state of gentle anxiety. One afternoon, I saw that another developer I was following was streaming some development on Twitch, and for whatever reason, despite not having any prior interest in streams, I decided to head to his channel and watch him work. I felt a sense of kinship and over the next few months I kept on showing up regularly, and eventually I made two of my best friends who also worked in the same engine I used to work in, one of whom was the guy whose streams I initially started watching. I can very safely say that it was almost solely through their continued presence and support of me that I was able to finally find the ability to start working on games again. I finally found not just one, but two people who understood almost exactly what I felt, the kind of extremely particular anxieties and frustrations and elations that come with working on games as a particular kind of person, whom I could trust with my feelings to be able to say, “yeah, I get what you mean, I feel that way too”. They were the ones who inspired me to first start working on My Work Is Not Yet Done, and who in time eventually encouraged me to pursue it as a commercial work (initially I was just intending on working on it for a bit and just releasing it for free).
I don’t know if making games is the thing I’m “meant” to do in this life, or if they’re the most efficient way of communicating how I feel, or if I’m even that good at making them; I don’t know if, who knows, maybe if things had gone right, if I’d met the right people at the right time, I could’ve been a successful academic, or a teacher, or a priest, or a web designer or a trench digger or a coroner or a line cook or a soldier or whatever. The thing is, though, I didn’t. I’ve had a lot of dreams that were nothing more and a lot more ambitions that amounted to nothing. I’ve tried a lot of things in my life, I’ve been to a lot of places and I’ve met a lot of people who’ve told me a lot of things, about the world, about myself, about where I fit in (and usually, where I don’t). And the only thing I ever felt welcome doing was working on games: not just because I succeeded — but because at first, I didn’t.
When I was young I was told to live my life in pursuit of what I was passionate about, but I felt passionate about a lot of things, and could never commit. At the root of that word “passion”, as it’s almost cliched to point out these days, is the Latin “pati”: to suffer. Slowly, over the years I suffered through my passions — one by one, they dissipated silently, meaninglessly, fading into the backdrop of my memory. Who knows, maybe Work will end up being an abject commercial and critical failure, maybe (most likely not, but who knows) I’ll completely fuck this one up too somehow. But this time, I know that even if I do, I won’t have to suffer through it alone. I know there won’t be a boot waiting for me, eager to kick me down; I know that someone’s got my back. I can’t tell if I feel this way because the games industry in particular tends to attract certain kinds of people, or if I just got very lucky, but either way, I suppose it doesn’t matter too much. All I know is that I think I’ve finally found something worth suffering through; not because the end is particularly rewarding, or the work itself is particularly interesting most days, but because it’s the only thing that’s really made me feel a genuine sense of good faith in and love for one another and the craft. That’s good enough for me.
