Preemptive Retaliation

The Steam summer sale has come and gone and, despite having a substantial backlog as it is, I ended up acquiring eight new games. A few of these had been sitting on my wishlist for a while, whilst others were spontaneous or drunken purchases. Two of them were kind of both.

I’ve bought Zork: Nemesis and Zork: Grand Inquisitor about four or five times since I was about ten. Why do I keep buying them? I don’t know. Maybe it’s like that film where Mel Gibson has to keep buying Catcher in the Rye over and over, I just have an impulse. Maybe I just like them. I think it’s more to do with the nostalgia of it all. It’s like watching an old film so much you’ve almost memorised the lines (“I’ll call you ageless, faceless, gender-neutral, culturally ambiguous adventure person, Afgncaap, for short” is a joke I repeat to myself when writing characters with no names), and there’s something good about having that childish familiarity. For Nemesis, I find myself reliving the dread of being in its environments, the weird horror of the puzzles and the fact that there were pictures of butts and boobies all over the place, which tickled my prepubescent mind. Now that I’m older I can appreciate the story and themes, but yo, check out them boobies.

But I don’t want to talk about that today. Instead I want to talk about the wildly different tone between the two, and how it mirrors problems I have when writing.

From what I’ve played, the Zork series isn’t supposed to be highbrow adventure. It’s silly, and comedic, and had ridiculous characters and circumstance. Spells revolve around turning buildings into fudge. Torches make jokes. The world is insane and humorous, and Grand Inquisitor really hammers that in. The jokes come every few steps. Everyone is witty, with even a door cracking some jokes. The plot is farcical and self-referential and while there is peril for the player (strangling grass, bottomless pits, six-armed-invisible-bridge-guys) it’s all jokey in nature. It fits in with the world.

Nemesis is quite the opposite. You start the game entering a dark land, sweeping over a graveyard and being dropped at the steps of a huge, foreboding temple. The first place you visit is a crypt, with a ghost entreating you to save her, and a violin playing sad songs to itself inside a marble coffin. Eventually you meet four more spirits who are cursed to an eternal torture by an unknown enemy, and you’re tasked to free them. It’s dark. It’s a dark story that doesn’t let up, and gets all the darker when the rest of the story unravels. The characters have motivations and pathos, the settings are well fleshed out and realised, the plot is actually pretty decent, and it takes itself very seriously… until it doesn’t. Because it’s set in the Zork universe – a universe based on comedy and hijinks – there are instances of humour peppered here and there. I spent an hour exploring a monastery where a man was agonising over his sins and trespasses, only to spend time in his museum of Zork artefacts, such as a bowl of sacred granola, or a childish magician wand. Or I’m in the depths of a twisted asylum, only to find a dick joke hidden in a book somewhere.

And the thing is, it just doesn’t work.

All the jokes and references to the rest of the world just fall completely flat in Nemesis. They all either seem in poor taste or grossly out of tone. Not only is it out of place though, but it’s jarring to the themes and feeling of the actual game. It took me right out of the tense oppressiveness of my mission and made me doubt the stakes I was in. The balance of seriousness and humour felt completely mismanaged. It didn’t ruin the story, sure, but it was enough depreciate the value of what it was trying to say.

Another, more literary, instance of this is Ian Banks’ The Crow Road which was a delightfully poignant and funny coming of age story that gets derailed by a super serious murder mystery which isn’t even needed. I felt like it mussed up the whole tone of the story, meaning I had to think of it as a thriller instead of just a person figuring out who they are. It doesn’t stop my enjoyment, but it could’ve been better.

This is a problem that I’ve always struggled with; the balance of seriousness in a story. My stories tend to fall on the more serious side of the scale; I use my fiction to try and contemplate life and emotions, and the different things that people do to each other. My stories are oh so serious with characters that take themselves oh so seriously. This isn’t by itself a bad thing, but I find that it can be so draining to be in that type of world, a world where there’s no space to crack jokes or have humour. If it can be draining to write it, then it must be draining to read it.

This all adds to the general anxiety that I get while writing. Is this funny enough? Is there enough light heartedness in this to keep the reader going? Or will it be completely out of place? Even now, as I write this, I’m thinking the same thing. How many paragraphs have I gone through without making a humorous comment or a pleasant anecdote? I know that I’m not writing a comedy but… Some of this is a need to reassure the reader that the story is human, that I am human. This isn’t a world where everyone spends their days wracked with existential crisis. They smile and laugh and get bored. But then that isn’t the point of the story.

In research for my current novel I’ve been watching a few Noir films. Brick and The Big Sleep and Seven and Looper and trying to find out what makes a good mystery and a good story. In writing this post I’ve forced myself back to when there’s humour in these movies. A lot of it is in sarcastic plays during conversations, or witty one-liners that make me smile. Otherwise there’s not much. The characters are serious, they have a quest to undertake and they do so with the seriousness they deserve. I’ve been trying to emulate their style, but I’m finding it difficult.

I think a part of this is because I’m afraid of being too serious. Growing up, I always admired people who could tell a good joke, who could be witty and had the ability to frame a story in an interesting way. This is something I’ve spent my life trying to match, to make people laugh as often as possible with one-liners and off-the-cuff jokes. In the right mood, I can get pretty good at it, with my word to laugh ratio quite high when I’m on a role. I realise that this could be part of some overall defence mechanism, but I’m not going to get into that here. Instead I’m going to get into the worry that people might think that I take myself too seriously. It’s a mocking term that might’ve been levelled against me a few times in my life, a criticism that I can’t take a joke, that I am too serious. So I use jokes.

This would obviously transfer over to my writing. Since my writing is an extension of myself and how I interpret the world, it’s natural that I want to inject jokes into it. Keep the humour light and present. But then it doesn’t fit, does it? Like Nemesis, the humour acts as a detriment to the seriousness of the situation. A jarring wake-up where the words don’t fit the rest of the world.

But then what’s the alternative? Something super serious that doesn’t crack a smile to break the tension? No, that’s not the answer.

This whole article can be summed up as “there’s a balance to this”, and that’s an obvious answer, but it’s also a vague one. I know there’s a balance to this, I can feel it and I can see it in so many pieces of great work. The answer to this problem is that; the jokes need to fit the tone of the piece, the humour must be in line with the situation, otherwise it falls flat. But what is that balance? Where does my voice reside on the jokey scale?

Times like these I wish this place was more of an open forum and not a semi-public personal rant about the craft. If I could ask you what your balance is, what would you say? How do you feel about the accusation that you’re being oh so serious?

Still, it’s good that I can recognise when these things happen in other media, and it’s good that I can recognise it’s something I need to work on in my own work. I just wish the answer came a lot easier, that I wasn’t wracked with self-doubt on the seriousness of my work. Though, that’s a whole other problem entirely.