Overwrought

If you'd read this blog at all beforehand, perhaps you might have noticed the quiet appearance of the title banner up there. I have to say I'm pleased with it; I feel it's not absolutely and utterly perfect, but I'm pleased with it nonetheless and to be honest the overwhelming portion of me thinks that no matter how perfect it might appear to anyone else, I'll likely remain more critical anyway. If you've ever read designer-written discourses on how perfection is never perfection when you're the creative party, you'll understand; I don't mean to suggest it actually is perfect, but at some point in the creative process you have to just take a step back and recognise that a piece is finished, even if it doesn't represent or match closely enough the image that had formed in your mind about how a concept should look. The audience, too, is never going to know how it was at first imagined to look, either: they're going to see it as it is and, unless it's bad, they won't be as critical as you, the designer, is being at all. And really, to be perfectly honest, it does actually look very much how I had imagined it would. The background to the banner is a texture I painted based on cork oak bark (there's relevance to that, as I may expound upon), and the hand-rendered lettering is the most successful version of a few experiments I did in order to get the imperfect, almost-filamentous look of the (completely unnecessary but, in my opinion, completely spot-on) ligatures that give it an almost seal- or cartouche-like appearance.

In short...I'm happy with it. Photoshop and Illustrator skills are indeed well-employed when you're a graphic designer!

That whole idea of imperfect completion, though, is I think what a lot of authors - established or aspiring - struggle with. For instance, I wrote the first draft of my novella (which I'm still strangely reticent to name "out loud", as if by doing so I'm communicating the entire plot and reading it word-for-word for someone to then convert into their own manuscript and promote as their own work. Yes, I'm fully aware that this presents me as decidedly paranoid) just over five years ago and, after basically doing a re-read through once, put down and let sit for a couple of years at a length of 32,000-ish words. When I received positive feedback on it even in that state, and after having devoted the entirety of 2013 to producing a graphic design portfolio while studying the subject (go check it out! http://be.net/bysimonrandell - self-promotion self-promotion self-promotion), I was ready, I think, to return to it and edit it again, this time incorporating new character development for otherwise plot-device personalities (a truly awful thing. If someone isn't there by merit of their own presence...the story is too dependent on them. I realise most stories are dependent on the characters living them, but if the only reason to include a woman named Marjory is to bridge the gap between one part of the story and the next...it's too tenuous. What if Marjory suddenly died? What if Marjory hadn't noticed whatever it is she noticed in order to propel the plot forwards? Why am I discussing the merits of Marjory? But seriously: Marjory either as to be a character already present and developed in order for her role as a plot-propulsion device to be acceptable, or the plot needs reworking. Marjory is either a character by her own merit, or she's not. And from a more personal perspective, I know what it's like to be treated as if [and told so] I were a plot device; it's not fun. Don't do that to poor, poor Marjory) and to concern myself more with themes which had been alluded to but which I'd up until that point not really included by intent. The story is now over 38,000 words - and is complete in itself, as I believe I've mentioned before.

However...I do keep wondering whether I should go back and add more stuff in. Should I mention what the antagonist had to survive by eating things the otherwise would have preferred to avoid, in order that it is an even more well-developed character? Should I speak of the moon, indicating clearly by implication and inference how much time is passing? In short, I believe the answer - despite continuing to consider such things - is no, I shouldn't. In the first case it's largely because I don't necessarily want the antagonist to be an open book. In the second, again, it's because I don't want things to be set out so definitively. And also, realistically, the mechanic of time is a passive one - there is no role that the hours play beyond that time advances, as time does, and that doesn't really need more reference than the occasional allusion to the environment. Really I've already arrived at the conclusion that the story is complete in its imperfection - as all stories are, as all designs are. There comes a point at which the process of creation is finished: anything beyond that could further reinforce the object created, but without that reinforcement it is not lacking anything. Sometimes, in fact, the aspects which are not further developed become part of the intentional form or purpose. Basically, the idea of "less is more" is, generally applied, true, and there is no point or benefit gained from having been overwrought.

And that, weirdly, brings me to something else I'd been considering earlier today (and have considered many times before now). I make no secret of being a bit of a gameplay-walkthrough-junkie, as in, I'll spend much time watching Youtube videos of people playing games I (mostly) haven't played. It really is entertaining. But, strangely, there's also that definite sense of being privy to a story: we can all read books or watch movies and experience being an audience, and watching games being played from start to finish has become a roughly similar experience over the past ten years. It wasn't, way-back-when - if you weren't playing the game then you were the unfortunate audience who was entirely lacking agency within the story and therefore had limited investment and limited enjoyment. Nowadays you don't have to exert agency within the world of a game in order to still be invested in its progression from start to finish. That, I think, has a lot to do with the sophistication that began to become core to games as their reason for existence; you can't just throw someone into a world without a reason or a cause for their presence and expect it to all make sense, though some notable older games did just that and at the time were highly successful. The trouble is, though, that sometimes you notice things that leave you wondering.

For me, such a thing is the dialogue of certain fantasy games these days. The storylines are meant to be dramatic, and to a point I can understand that - for why else would people play, unless caught up in the promise of some epic adventure with grand consequences and dire risks? And, of course, because of the influence of such things as The Lord of the Rings: things have to, somehow, live up to the grandeur of that kind of Truly Epic, particularly when they could be said to be hijacking a lot of the theretofore non-existent standards present in Tolkien's works. Unfortunately - as I've mentioned before - the ideas of so many of the present-day fantasy worlds created as if somehow new or different recycle a lot of the same stuff: elves are Humans Plus, orcs are (evil) Humans Plus, Green Edition. But that's to some extent understandable - if something works, why change it to sit outside expectations? And of course, it's not as if I don't like games that have elves and orcs - I absolutely adore the Elder Scrolls games, though those prior to Morrowind I haven't seen much, if anything, of.

It's the dialogue, really, that bothers me. Dialogue that is supposed to take the listener or reader out of the modern context is one thing, and often dialogue needs to be replete with flourish and redundancy - after all, that's how people communicate, and that's how stories which could be 32,000 words become 38,000 words...haha. But there's a certain amount of cliché which I think becomes too overpowering. If a character says "I will let nothing get in my way", for instance, that's really all that need be said. Yet one game I can think of in particular would have the character say "I will let nothing get in my way, do you hear me?! Nothing!" On its own this isn't so bad. You can tell merely from the words that this particular character would be quite impassioned and set in their stance. Yet because those words are typically all grouped together as a verbal cliché, they lose their impact and become predictable and empty - so much so as to make them formulaic. Anyone who has read Homer's Iliad and Odyssey probably has some understanding that the reason Homer, or the poets collectively called Homer in today's regard, utilised formulae ("wine-dark sea") was because by using such predictable and set word patterns the rhythm of the recited poems (both of these surviving epics were initially recited by bards, only later being written down and cemented as singular versions) could be maintained. In that regard the predictability of the words was sensible because it gave the poet a sense of where they were in their recitation, and allowed proper pacing...but the constant reference to the wine-dark sea likely did nothing to really inform the audience of the sea itself. An epithet is only meaningful if it is meant to retain its meaning, and like any word if it's said too often it becomes a mere collection of syllables. So too do over-used statements in dialogue, even if they're not over-used in the game but in the genre or in the wider culture (storytelling culture, for instance), and over-used formulae in internet fora ("Well, you could do that. Or you could do this. Hell, you could even..." - the latter sentence loses its emphasis, rather than gains it, purely because of how over-used the "hell, [extra option]" structure is).

I don't mean to criticise so much, really. It's just something I've noticed in some media, particularly games. It doesn't mean it's bad, it just means I find the impact of the words lost, and that's a sad thing. I think some cliché is unavoidable, of course: nobody's inventing language from scratch, and there are cultural trends at any given moment that will impact how something is communicated. It's just a great pity when the power of an object is lost because the way it is described uses someone else's words. Dialogue can be wrought without being overwrought, and if the level to which the work on it is present is relevant to the medium...then it fits. It's when that work transitions into over-work that something loses its meaning. Probably, at this stage, a bit like this blog entry.