Castle/Princess/Dragon

Today the 23rd Interactive Fiction Competition is open!

I have a text game entered. It’s called Eat Me, and it’s about eating your way through an enchanted castle.

Lime Ergot is a great little text game that I’ve mentioned before. Now it’s been translated into Spanish! Translations for text games like this don’t happen too often, which makes it pretty special.

If you want to check out the Spanish version, you can play it online here.

You can play the original English version online here.

A housecat bard serenades a lioness queen. Later, the lioness will dangle a love note on a string for the cat to play with, and right in open court. Scandal!

This is a scene from The Tale of the Fox, a stop-motion movie from 1937 directed by Ladislas Starevich. The lioness and cat aren’t central characters. Mostly the story revolves around Reynard, the titular fox, whose cleverness and cruelty turn the animal kingdom against him. An inspiration for Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox.

This is just a thrown-together post about a minor technical issue with Inform 7. I ran into trouble trying to figure it out, I finally figured it out, and I figured I’d write down the steps for anyone else who might need help.

How do you edit basic text styling in a parser game for Quixe?

That’s the issue. Here’s how to do it.

First of all, what’s Quixe? It’s an interpreter that comes built into the newer versions of Inform 7. In order to play most parser games in the past, users had to download their own separate interpreters to run the game files. What Quixe does is it generates an HTML file with all your game data so that anyone can play the game in a web browser instead. No extra interpreters needed. Easy online play by simply sharing the game link.

In order to get Inform 7 to build a Quixe website for your game, you just include this line anywhere in your Inform 7 code:

Release along with a website and an interpreter.

There are a few benefits to having a Quixe website for a parser game. I’m only concerned with basic text effects right now. Previously you couldn’t do that much, as a game designer, to determine how an interpreter rendered text, because every user had their own interpreter with its own settings. But when you build a Quixe website, you control its CSS, so you can change the text styling.

First you have to tweak a few things. Go to Inform 7’s Settings tab and change the Story Style Format to Glulx. Then add this line anywhere in your game’s Inform 7 code:

Include Glulx Text Effects by Emily Short.

After you’ve done that, you now have the ability to invoke 11 different styles to format your game’s text. These styles are:

roman type italic type bold type fixed letter spacing alert style blockquote style header style input style note style special-style-1 special-style-2

To use them, you’d write code like this:

Carry out examining yourself: say “You are a [bold type]bold person[roman type] with [italic type]italic clothes[roman type].”

During gameplay, if a player types EXAMINE ME, they would then get this output:

You are a bold person with italic clothes.

That, at least, is the default style, which looks how you would expect it to look. Bold text is bold. Italic text is italic. However, these styles can actually be changed. In the case of special-style-1 and special-style-2, they must be changed to produce a result, since those two styles are originally designated as empty slots.

In order to edit these styles, you need to edit the file called glkote.css that Inform 7 generates when it creates a Quixe game. Inside the main Release folder, you’ll find an Interpreter folder, and inside that folder is the glkote.css file. Open it and scroll to the bottom. You’ll find a list that looks kinda like this:

.Style_normal { }

.Style_emphasized { }

.Style_preformatted { }

.Style_header { }

.Style_subheader { }

.Style_alert { }

.Style_note { }

.Style_blockquote { }

.Style_input { }

.Style_user1 { }

.Style_user2 { }

These 11 styles correspond to the 11 styles that you can invoke inside Inform 7, with tags like roman, italic, bold, etc. You can edit any of them to any style you want. Just because the italic tag is named “italic” doesn’t mean it must produce italicized text. It will produce anything you want. You could even make it produce bold text. But be sure to keep it labeled as “italic” so that the tags inside Inform match the tags inside glkote.css.

Okay, that’s that covered, but the reason I started messing with all this stuff is because I wanted to center some text. This poses a problem. Quixe and Inform support most basic CSS text styles. You can look at any CSS tutorial online, find out about the available styles, and plop what you want into that glkote.css file.

However, text alignment does not normally work! If you want to center text, you have to use block elements. Since special-style-1 starts out blank, I’ll use it as a template to show how. Edit glkote.css like this:

.Style_user1 {    display: block;    padding: 0 65px 0 0;    text-decoration: none;    width:100%;    text-align:center; }

Then inside Inform 7, invoke that style like this:

Carry out examining yourself: say “[special-style-1]You are centered[roman type].”

When you open your game’s play.html file and type EXAMINE ME, then the response text ought to be centered.

Today C.E.J. Pacian released a new text game: Superluminal Vagrant Twin.

I love this game.

You’re a bankrupt spaceship captain whose twin is being held hostage by an intergalactic mobster until you can pay off your debts. What do you owe this mobster? Oh, just a measly 5000k kilocredits. Nothing that an enterprising captain such as yourself can’t scrape together with enough cargo runs to various planets throughout the galaxy, and enough bounty hunting, and maybe some dabbling in political intrigue… and some spaceship races… and information smuggling… and, well, you get the idea.

The gameplay mechanics are elegant and simple. All you need to do to navigate with your spaceship is land, launch, and jump to whatever planet you want to visit. When you need to refuel, you refuel. When you want to talk to somebody, you talk to them. You can take and buy and sell things, and with just these commands and a few more in change, you’re ready to strike out into the universe.

What you’ll find is a sparkling space opera studded with subplots and characters drawn from countless science-fiction traditions. Alien ambassadors. Androids. Deposed politicians. Pirates. Generals. Cyberpunks. Spies. Molonks. Molonks? Yes, whatever molonks are. There is even a world of cats. You never spend much time on any single planet; rather, you’re always zipping through, chasing the next adventure.

Pacian calls the gameplay “broad but shallow,” which is accurate. You’re like a stone skipping across a pond. Ripples spread through the story around you, but you never quite dip into the depths. What this does, however, is plant seeds for you to imagine what those depths contain. A universe where every corner is accounted for isn’t a real universe.

More than anything else, this game brings to mind Outlaw Star for me. One reason I love that cartoon is because its fictional world seems to expand beyond the show’s narrative boundaries. Technologies, governments, cultures, religions, and alien races are referenced with tantalizing details here and there, but nothing is ever explained with the encyclopedic exhaustion that some science-fiction will attempt. Superluminal Vagrant Twin works the same way. It knows that you should always leave blank spots on the map for future captains to explore.

Did I mention that this game is free, and playable online?

You can play it by clicking right here.

sub-Q magazine has just released a new text game of mine called What Fuwa Bansaku Found. I'm personally quite happy with this one! It's about a samurai exploring a haunted shrine, and it was inspired by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi's woodblock prints.

It's a parser game, meaning that you type commands to interact with the text, but you only need a few commands to play. It also doesn't have puzzles, just exploration.

You can play the game online at sub-Q here.

Lime Ergot is a text game by Caleb Wilson that was originally written for EctoComp and just republished today by sub-Q magazine. If you don't know about sub-Q, you should: it's the only professional lit mag dedicated to interactive fiction, and it’s free. (As a disclosure, I should mention that it’s published me before, but I’d recommend it anyway.) And if you haven't played Lime Ergot, you should: in my opinion it's the most perfect hybrid between traditional literature and parser gameplay that currently exists.

This is the link to play it. You can't click that link fast enough.

Here's the plot overview: you're a lieutenant stranded at an abandoned colonial outpost with a general. You're in the tropics. It's a hot day. The general wants you to make her a lime cocktail called a "green skull."

Now normally, in a parser game, this would be a puzzle. Collect the cocktail's ingredients. Prepare the drink. Deliver it to the general to solve the puzzle. This is also what happens in Lime Ergot, but the difference is that the puzzle encompasses the entire plot. Finding ingredients isn't a task that sends you scurrying around on a fetch-quest. Instead what you have to do is examine the scenery around you, and then examine that scenery on a deeper level, plunging deeper and deeper until you've located a lime for the cocktail.

What this produces is a hallucinatory effect. You, Lieutenant Musco, never budge from where you're standing with the general on a wharf. You can look, for example, at some foliage growing beside the wharf and discover a rusted sword nestled inside. Examining this sword will reveal a lizard sitting beneath it, examining the lizard will reveal that it's curled around a goblet, and inside the goblet are rotted telegrams that you can read. When you examine the telegrams, the game provides this text:

It seems to be a bundle of telegrams related to the retreat from--sorry, strategic deployment back home from--St. Stellio... though, ah... hmm... it's eight feet away, covered with mold, with slime, the letters wriggling and kinking like the worms that appear in buckets and puddles after a rain storm... How strange. You blink. There's nothing there. Maybe your eyes are fatigued by the sunlight, are playing tricks on you?

This may just seem like a neat trick for the story to be playing, but it's a revolutionary way to deliver a narrative using parser gameplay. Examining your environment to find the limes is a process that not only locates the limes, but also transforms your environment into a fever dream. The mechanics you use to interact with the story are what reinforce, what deliver its meaning.

You're not just solving a puzzle here. In fact, you may not even realize that the game has a puzzle, because the puzzle design has been exploded and repurposed. It's streamlined, it's smooth, it's simply what you do to read the story. In other words, it's the exact opposite from almost every other puzzle where you have to fiddle and tinker with puzzle pieces.

More than that, Lime Ergot accomplishes what it does with a compact system. Since it's a parser game, what this means is that you have to type commands to interact with it. In many parser games, the amount of potential commands is staggering, but that's not true here. You can finish Lime Ergot with only four commands:

EXAMINE (something) TAKE (something) PUT (something) IN (something) GIVE (something)

This means that the game is easily playable even for people who are unfamiliar with parser conventions, which is a great selling point since this game is much closer to traditional literature than it is to a text adventure. It's essentially a short story being delivered via the parser.

But it could never be told as a short story. Its presentation is melded into its narrative. I've been talking about its mechanics, about collecting limes to prepare a cocktail, but I haven't mentioned what the story is actually about. This is a horror story. It's not horror in the normal sense. There are no monsters. There are no tense scenes, such as you might expect to find in a thriller. Everything is indolent and hazy. The horror emerges, not from activity, but from paralysis -- from the decay that has infused St. Stellio's doomed outpost. What damage there is has already been done; now the story's characters are left in the wreckage that they helped create.

At this point, after the retreat -- sorry, "strategic deployment back home" -- of the colonizing forces, both General Tudor-Adolphus and Lieutenant Musco have nowhere left to turn. It doesn't matter that the general led St. Stellio's conquest and that the lieutenant only arrived when it was mostly over. Their fates, as two cogs in the same military system, will be equal. Now they will prepare a cocktail derived from the limes on the island that repelled their government, and that cocktail will not go down well.

Lime Ergot wraps you in the disease that plagues the island. Playing the game is experiencing, in text, the same disorientation that Lieutenant Musco suffers from and that follows in colonialism’s wake.

EctoComp is an annual contest for Halloween-themed interactive fiction. Its games were released yesterday, which is when I probably should've written about it… you know, on Halloween… but it's still worth checking out now if you like horror writing. Some games were coded in under three hours as part of a speed challenge, but others are longer and more polished.

I have a game entered myself, but I don't want to talk about that. I want to talk about Voice Box by B Minus Seven. This is my favorite game in the lineup.

It's a very short Twine game, essentially flash fiction. If you've played Twine games or read choose-your-own-adventure stories before, you know the drill with how they'll often use branching narratives. Voice Box uses branches too, but they're tiny, tiny branches, compacted together into a single story. Even though they’re short, there is so much packed into each one. You can't just zip through them. You really have to stop and think.

As for the story, it's surreal horror. A woman has her voice stolen by two creatures in the night, who give her another voice instead. At each branch, she can react by "weeping" or "seeking," suggesting passivity or action, and you follow her down bizarre dream paths. The writing is very sharp, intelligent, and rhythmic.

All the EctoComp games are free to play. Some are straight horror, some are comedy, some are a mix. There's one game where you play as a cat who loses its nine lives due to mishaps around the house with Tesla coils and cursed pentagrams. Normal stuff that a cat might get into. (Don’t worry, the cat always comes back.)

You can directly download all the games in an archive by clicking here.

One day, after coming home from work, a man noticed that something had changed about his house’s vestibule: there was a chair against one wall. It had a high back, carved wooden paws for feet, and a very fine red cushion. He didn’t, however, think much about it, and assumed that his wife had made the purchase. But he couldn’t question her because she was away visiting relatives. So he simply went about things normally, and had his dinner, and put his son to bed, and so on and so forth.

A few days later, his wife saw the chair for the first time when she was stepping out for an appointment. She thought that it looked hideous, and that was enough for her to chalk up its presence to her husband’s bad taste. However, since she was late for her appointment, she didn’t have the time to ask him about it, and further engagements and distractions finally made her forget about the issue. In the meantime, he had also forgotten about asking her.

They went on, therefore, living for a week under the mutual misunderstanding that they had each bought the chair without the other’s consent (not that it mattered, though, since the chair was just a chair). But eventually the question came up when they were both passing through the vestibule together on their way out to a restaurant.

“By the way, where ever did you get that thing?” she asked him, pointing to it.

“Me?” he said. “I thought that it was yours.”

After which they both looked at each other, and then looked at the chair. But it just stood there, as chairs will.

“Well, if it isn’t yours,” he said, “and if it isn’t mine, then whose is it?”

“I have no idea. When did it get here?”

“At least five days ago.”

“And you didn’t buy it?”

“Absolutely not!”

After which they both looked at each other again, even more confused than they had been, before her husband went over and tried—for the first time—to actually sit on the chair. But it ambled away, and disappeared after walking through a wall.

More questions were raised than were answered by this incident.

Both husband and wife, who were not, it must be said, very religious, became very religious in a few days. They had to be, when demonic influence was the likeliest theory they could imagine. They cautiously arranged an interview with a local clergyman, and fell all over each other in conversation as they tried to awkwardly explain their problem to him. They felt very stupid, and it was obvious that the clergyman thought so too. However, he agreed to report the haunting—if it could be called that—to his superiors. Maybe, he told them, a good old-fashioned exorcism could be arranged; but the church never did follow through.

Having failed in that arena, both husband and wife agreed that someone still ought to investigate the situation’s paranormal aspects, and they hired a medium. But if they had felt foolish talking to the clergyman, they felt even worse when this “expert,” dressed in black crape, rang their doorbell and proceeded to wander aimlessly through their house looking for “hot spots.” That, though, wasn’t even the most embarrassing part, since the medium reported sensing nothing whatsoever.

They might have then given up their inquiry into affairs if they didn’t, late at night, still find themselves sitting up, talking about what had happened. If only one or the other had seen it, they might have been able to convince themselves that it had been a hallucination, but since they had both seen it, they couldn’t deny the event. Something would have to be done, they decided, no matter how much it cost their dignity.

So they hired a carpenter, and they hired an architect. They had the carpenter dismantle and scrutinize every other piece of furniture that they possessed. The architect they tasked with going over, in detail, their entire house, and especially the wall through which the enigmatic chair had disappeared. This took weeks, and they were up to their eyeballs in sawdust and blueprints before the carpenter was able to declare, with more than total certainty, how outstandingly normal their furniture was, and before the architect could confirm that their walls were, indeed, normal walls, built in the standard way. But these findings, of course, were not what the couple had wanted to hear.

At their wits’ end, they contracted a feng shui master to rearrange their house and see if anything—they dropped hints heavy enough to outweigh bowling balls—might have been “wrong” with it before. What they wound up with, however, was no answer to their question, and a rock garden in their living room.

“C’est la vie,” the wife could only say about that one.

By now they had started to, if not doubt what they had seen, doubt their own sanity. After all, what proof did they actually have that they weren’t both unstable? They went, for an opinion about this, to a psychiatrist, where the only thing particular about them, they were told, was that they thought something was particular about them.

Pushed, at last, to the brink, and left unaided by every professional they had consulted, the husband went out and bought tools with which he could tear down the vestibule wall by himself. And although the wall, soon after, did come down, when he and his wife peered into the vacancy behind it, they discovered nothing relevant. The chair was nowhere to be seen, or even to be imagined. Then, during this scene, their son’s tutor walked into the room.

They naturally had some explaining to do, and by now had condensed their experience into an expertly polished anecdote, which they delivered in answer to the young man’s inevitable questions. When they found him sympathetic to their situation, though, they did more than deliver that anecdote.

“It’s maddening,” the husband said.

“You can’t know what we’ve been through,” said the wife.

“No one believes us.”

“And no one knows what’s happening.”

“There’s no other point, no other reference, in reality that touches what we’ve seen. We don’t even know what’s happening.”

After saying that, they both stared at him with anticipation.

But he only responded with, “I don’t quite know either.”

“If you had to make a guess, though,” pressed the husband. “From all the possibilities—the paranormal, the philosophical, the architectural, even the medical—what would you say? How could, why did, that chair disappear through that wall?”

“As to how,” the tutor said, “I don’t think I can answer.”

“Then as to why...?” the wife ventured.

The Countess Garibaldi was making preparations for a dinner party. What this meant was that her servants were making the preparations, and she would claim the credit without lifting a finger. No, no, her manicurist was lifting her fingers as the countess reclined on a lounge in her boudoir, while her kitchen was roaring with activity downstairs, and her maids dragging mops over floors, and her footmen unboxing fine china, with her faithful butler helming these domestic maneuvers—for if the countess would not stir from her boudoir, she was still paying the bill, and her standards would be maintained.

There was, however, one wrinkle. The footman responsible for arranging the tablecloths and napkins made an unfortunate discovery, which he brought to the butler’s attention. The issue was a stain, but not just any stain.

Thankfully the butler was a man with much experience. He drew the footman aside before there could be any panic. What he wanted to know was how such a stain had been made.

The footman didn’t know.

But the footman could appreciate what this development meant. After all, who would not have been able to appreciate it? Nothing about the upcoming party could be substandard. Luminaries would be in attendance. One small trifle might precipitate ruin, and this stain was no trifle. The butler did not want to imagine what might happen were it not removed. But the footman could imagine what might happen, couldn’t he?

The footman could. Action had to be taken without drawing any attention.

Having consulted with his superior, the footman’s next measure was to attempt eliminating the stain through his own devices. He went into a washroom and scrubbed the soiled linen under a faucet. But the hot water would not help; nor would the scrubbing. The soap in the washroom would not help either. He tried using brushes. He tried using sponges. It was evident that an expert would be required.

The footman managed to corner a maid in the pantry whose discretion had been established on previous, happier occasions. She was mistaken to assume that such occasions would reveal their sequel now, though, and when she saw the stain her first reaction was to lunge for the doorknob, but the footman intercepted her. She had repaired textiles before; could she not orchestrate some magic with a hot iron or anything like that?

The maid knew that her greatest trial had arrived. She examined the fabric at arm’s length. Its defect was beyond her science, but she would wage whatever war she could.

The next sequence discovered the footman and maid in a sequestered laundry, where chemicals were arranged along the shelves, and tubs filled with lye stood on the floor equipped with corrugated boards. There was detergent encrusted in the drains and steam in the air, and in this laboratory every method was concocted to salvage the linen that human logic could devise. The result, unfortunately, was no better than the original problem, and when the maid outstretched it damply with her fingertips, it might have been a black spot on a bible leaf.

The footman began to manifest a more visible anxiety. The maid could not relieve him; the maid could not relieve herself; the maid at this juncture foreswore all involvement but the footman was desperate and dogged her for more aid.

In what?

In searching the closets, the attics, the cellars. The linen belonged to a set. Perhaps there was another duplicate stored somewhere. 

They began to poke into every nook and cranny, plundering the upstairs and the downstairs, with the maid deeply regretting, as she unhinged the lid from a dust-covered trunk packed with lace handkerchiefs, that she had not married the local tinsmith as her mother had advised five years ago. The footman was meanwhile ransacking wardrobes and chests, diving into bureaus, turning out drawers from dressers. There were endless brocades, crochets, damasks, quilts, silks, and satins, but none matched the particular mode that the countess had selected for the party.

It was only after two hours had passed that the footman belatedly realized he had been abandoned. He was kneeling, sorting through a cupboard, when the maid didn’t reply to some question.

The sky was darkening outside the window. A grandfather clock chimed from the entrance hall. He felt that he had come to a crisis.

One final recourse presented itself. A shop down the street provided many household furnishings for the countess’s estate, including such fashionable wares as Sèvres porcelain. The footman did not obtain permission but departed unnoticed through a rear doorway and made as prompt a pilgrimage to the establishment as his legs could manage. He had, in his pocket, a watch, whose minute-hand he monitored with mounting agony until he stood outside the shop ringing the bell. He had to ring the bell because the door was locked at the day’s end, although he prayed he might still catch the clerk.

He caught the clerk. That wizened man looked like a miracle made flesh when he opened the latch. The footman did all that he could to explain the circumstance, extending the stained linen for the clerk to examine. He required the same fabric, the same cut, the same pattern, and he required it now.

But he could not get it now, for it wasn’t in stock.

Not in stock?

It would have to be specially ordered—from France. The clerk could recall when the countess had first commissioned it. She had taken great pains to employ an exclusive manufacturer. Would anything else serve instead?

The footman repeated this miserable inquiry to himself on his return journey. The party’s theme would have to be altered, new colors chosen, different decorations selected, which would necessitate another conference with the butler. He would have to screw his courage to the sticking-place, and when he reentered the house he was prepared, but then he turned the corner and saw the butler in the dining room laying the silver.

He began to speak, but could not find his voice. The butler’s broad and black-jacketed back was like a malevolent field into which the world’s light had been drawn and diffused, and the footman could only tremble.

At last the butler reached one place setting and, glancing behind, glimpsed the footman, which was convenient because that place setting happened to be the very one wanting its linen. Had the footman fulfilled his duty in relation to a certain unmentionable setback?

There was commotion in the hallway before any answer could be given. Guests had begun to arrive and would need the butler’s attention. The footman would please see to it that the table’s final element was in order.

The footman, dreadfully, did see to it.

More guests continued to arrive, and when the Countess Garibaldi made her debut in the salon, then the evening had truly started. Her famous wit was on display, along with her famous beauty. Everything had been accounted for to the last detail, from the crystal to the curtains to the carpets. There were trays laden with caviars and canapés, and piquant music, and general mirth, for the company had been curated to ensure that everyone was both engaging and engaged. It was silently comprehended, amongst all those present, that a bright star in society had gained a new apex, and that the countess, when she laughed delightfully at someone’s anecdote, for example, was sitting at a heretofore unprecedented zenith. She had become what others wanted to become; more—by becoming it, she had herself created the demand.

Now there was nowhere to go but into the dining room, where the table was abundant with orchids, and art chiseled in ice, and a servant stationed to pull back each seat for every guest. It was at this fateful moment, while the countess was signaling for wine and the kitchen doors parting for the first course, that a minor poet happened to glance down and notice something… unpleasant.

* * *

It would be unmerciful to document what specifics were involved in the subsequent and immediate downfall suffered by the Garibaldi legacy. Suffice it to remark that the dinner party ended with catastrophe, that much sport was made in the papers, that ridicule engendered ostracism, that loans were called in with an efficiency verging upon brutality, and that fortunes and families were reduced into shambles in the aftermath.

When the scandal was traced, the footman responsible was met with such outrage, even from common people on the street, that he could never remove the stain from his own character, and concluded his days penniless in a garret.

The butler, whose senior role in household management was not inexcusable, delivered a guilty verdict upon himself with a pistol.

The maid could not be found, having fled the country while the party was still underway.

Cat: This is the desert. What can you paint here?

Painter: The color.

Cat: Blue for the sky, blue for the dunes, that's dull.

Painter: I can use other colors too. And I can swap the dunes' calm lines for something else.

Cat: Why come here to reinvent everything? You could have done exactly the same in Russia.

Painter: No. Not exactly.

Cat: I prefer looking at nature than your daubs.

Painter: Me too. That's why I observe closely before I begin. I work with real things.

Cat: What does it feel like when you paint?

Painter: Like when you devour your prey. It was prettier running free, but you can't help it. You sink your teeth into it.

Cat: I understand.

A few months ago I wrote a post briefly analyzing Jafar from Aladdin. Now I want to talk about another Disney villain: Ratigan from The Great Mouse Detective (or Basil the Great Mouse Detective, depending on your region).

Just as Basil is based on Sherlock Holmes, his arch-nemesis Professor Ratigan is based on Holmes’s arch-nemesis Professor Moriarty. Both Moriarty and Ratigan are described as “the Napoleon of crime” by their respective rival detectives, and like his human counterpart, Ratigan is supposed to have his fingers in various underworld pies. As Basil says more than once during the film: “There’s no fiendish scheme he wouldn’t concoct—no depravity he wouldn’t commit.” Indeed, according to the lyrics in his introductory song, Ratigan’s criminal résumé includes drowning widows and orphans, apparently for sport.

I must say that I find Ratigan a more interesting character than Moriarty, who was essentially a scowling shadow invented by Doyle to throw Holmes down a waterfall. Ratigan is no scowling shadow. He is bursting with personality and neuroses, and besides being a genius he is also a showman.

Ratigan was animated by Glen Keane and voiced by Vincent Price. He towers over most other characters in the film because, whereas they are mainly mice, he is an enormous sewer rat. Although he is dressed in a three-piece suit complete with a cape and gloves, the fabric bulges as though its seams would rip apart from his massive body underneath. Every scene that he is in, he dominates, and not just physically. He has a craving for recognition and intimidates his minions into treating him as though he were royalty.

He has built his lair, appropriately, underground inside a wine cellar, in an empty cask, and this cask he has transformed into a palace. It has tiled floors, red carpets, a fountain flowing with pink champagne, and even a throne. The Crown Jewels—the actual Crown Jewels—are piled against one wall, plunder from the human world above. Perhaps these were stolen during the “Tower Bridge Job,” a previous caper that Ratigan mentions; in reality the jewels are housed in the Tower of London, close to the Tower Bridge, and have been for centuries.

Inside this lair, Ratigan is king. It is an illusion that he has carefully and consciously built for himself. One step outside and he is back in the grimy cellar, but inside he can wear a crown and robes and his minions, under threat of death, will rush to light his cigarettes and literally sing his praises.

The Great Mouse Detective is a strange Disney film in that it only has three musical numbers, and two are sung by the villain. Ratigan claims the spotlight even here, actually recording one song on a phonograph to play during Basil’s intended execution. This is diegetic music—it’s being performed “for real” inside the story—illustrating just how highly Ratigan values theatrics.

“Besides being a great villain, he is playing a great villain,” Vincent Price once said in an interview about the character. That hits the nail on the head.

Almost everything that Ratigan does is a performance. The interesting thing is that he doesn’t want the performance to end. He wants it to replace the world around him, and masking one reality with another is a theme that runs through the film.

When Basil first appears, he is dressed in red robes and a mask with a Fu Manchu moustache—a nod to similar disguises that Sherlock Holmes would wear to infiltrate places like opium dens. But then Basil removes the mask and he is Basil again. Later on, he and Dawson (the film’s Watson equivalent) wear more disguises to try blending in with sailors at a “seedy pub.” This time it is Ratigan who tears Basil’s false moustache away with the sarcastic remark, “Really, one would hardly recognize you.”

Ratigan wears a similar disguise, although he would never admit it. All his gestures are affected. Despite his hulking frame, he walks with tiny, mincing steps, sometimes even on tiptoe, with his clawed feet crammed into too-small shoes. He extends his pinky—a classically snobbish mannerism. And when he disarranges his hair during an outburst, he is quick to comb it back into an orderly shape with his fingers. Under no circumstance does he wish to appear as anything less than a perfect gentleman. But this isn’t his true nature: it is a mask hiding the rat underneath.

Ratigan’s species is codified in the film to represent his brutal, animalistic personality, in contrast to the mice. No matter how he might dress, no matter how charming he might attempt to be, he cannot escape being a rat. Everyone can see through his disguise as easily as they could see through Basil’s sailor costume. 

Using different animal species to represent different personality types is something that’s been done in many stories. Sometimes the conceit works. Sometimes it has unsavory implications, suggesting that one “species” can never accomplish what another “species” might. And sometimes, as in the famous comic Maus, the conceit breaks under its own weight, and we see how ridiculous it is to lump all Jewish people together as mice, all Germans as cats, all Poles as pigs, etc.

Ratigan’s characterization as a rat is what motivates his villainy. He will commit any crime to scramble into a higher social standing. He will kill his own subordinates if they refer to him as anything except a mouse. But he cannot change his species. This almost seems like essentialism until you realize that the mice in the film do not oppose rats with an easy one-to-one correspondence. Some mice are noble like Basil and Dawson, but others are criminals like Ratigan. Some, like the patrons in the pub, are gamblers and drunks with violent tempers. The film also features two lizards: one is Ratigan’s henchman, and the other is an innocent performer in a variety act who gets pelted with rotten fruit by a boorish audience.

In the end, the miniature animal-world in The Great Mouse Detective is just like the world in Maus, where characters cannot be pegged as good or bad based on their species. And yet Ratigan, like some people in the real world, does have essentialism ingrained into his mindset—ironically about his own species. The problem isn’t that others can’t accept him as a rat. After all, he has loyal followers, and even Basil acknowledges him as a genius. Rather, the problem is that he cannot accept himself as a rat.

This identity crisis is what fuels his penchant for theatrics. His grand scheme, which he spends the movie plotting to accomplish, is to replace the mouse queen with a mechanical duplicate. He would then control this duplicate and rule the realm by proxy. It is another disguise—another identity swapped, in this case the queen’s identity—and once again, nobody is meant to recognize it as a disguise. It is supposed to be the truth.

Of course the scheme fails. Basil sabotages the duplicate, whose robotics come to pieces before a very public audience at Buckingham Palace. And once again everyone sees through Ratigan’s false appearance.

The film’s climax is set inside Big Ben. I half suspect that the sequence was inspired by The Castle of Cagliostro, which also has its climax set inside a clock tower where the characters scramble amongst moving gears. Something that many people don’t realize is that the Big Ben sequence is an early example of computer animation. Computers were used to model the clock’s interior three-dimensionally, allowing the camera to move more freely through such a complex environment, and a mechanical arm actually sketched the sequence frame by frame with a pencil onto paper. As though it were being printed. Then the animators drew the characters superimposed over the computer-illustrated backgrounds.

I love this sequence. It’s one of my favorites in any movie. It has almost no dialogue—just low music building slowly to a crescendo as the gigantic gears click and echo inside the tower.

At this point, Ratigan has lost everything. His plot has been exposed, his henchmen have been killed or captured, he has been outwitted, and his cape is lodged in the clock gears as he watches Basil escape higher into the tower. His only way to free himself and pursue his nemesis is to shred his clothing apart, destroying his civilized persona, and climb the clock on all fours.

The moment when he finally snaps is perfect. Everything around him is clockwork, smoothly and rationally operating, and illustrated via the computer animation with a draftsman’s precision; but then the camera cuts, and cuts again, closer and closer to his enraged face, until you can actually see the angry pen strokes scratched into the paper. There’s no more extended pinky, no more mincing gait, as he lunges forward with a physical looseness and power he’s never displayed, fangs bared, claws out.

Thanks!

HUNTING UNICORN was the first choose-your-own-adventure that I wrote. I also wrote another really tiny one called creak, creak, and I’m working on more now.

I use a program called Twine. It’s free to download and really simple to learn! It has an interface where every page is a separate node on a map, and different lines connect the different nodes to show you which choices will lead the reader where. Very intuitive.

If you’re interested to look behind the scenes at the raw node map, I actually submitted it to the Twine Garden back in November. You can view it here.

I first learned about Twine through Porpentine’s works. She uses it to write most of her games. You can find a lot of her titles listed on the Interactive Fiction Database if you want to see what a master can do with the program.

After reading a ghost story, can the mind entertain questions other than this one: will it happen to me?

I had just finished a classic, vague tale—the kind where the specter is more a suggestion than anything else—when the clock downstairs struck two. I had been occupied reading since before sunset, and now it was the next morning already. But ghost stories, when they grip you, are worse than a vise: you just cannot get free from their horrifying pleasure until they themselves decide to yield.

And they had yielded, and I was free, and the clock was striking two. As I glanced around the unlit house, I found myself asking that question again: will it happen to me?

Never mind my belief in the supernatural. A tale with nocturnal terrors, read nocturnally, will make any sensitive reader search the vicinity for terrors like those found in the story. You may be sure that I searched my immediate vicinity many times before leaving my armchair. And then, when I did leave, I walked lightly: a creaking floorboard was enough to unravel my nerves.

Now I know that I said, just a moment ago, that my belief in the supernatural did not matter, but I suppose I must retract my statement already. That is because my disbelief in such phenomena—I was a disbeliever—acted as the primary force against any fear instilled within me by the stories I had read.

A ghost—or worse, a something, I would think, might lurk around this very bend.

Whereupon my more rational mind would chime in:

Such things don’t exist. How could they lurk around the bend?

Inevitably I would turn that bend—with anxious speed—to discover nothing more than an empty hallway. Again and again, turning every corner, my instincts would fight with my intellect, and my intellect would triumph. I would pass by an opened closet, for instance, and imagine demons lurking through its door.

But then I would think to myself: Demons in a closet? What nonsense!

And indeed, there would only be coats.

Things went on in this way for the entire way—the entire way down, I should say, because I was walking from my study to the kitchen on the ground floor.  I had been reading books for hours without a single drop to drink, and it was my thirst that drove me through those darkened halls.  Otherwise, with a triumphant intellect or not, I wouldn’t have budged an inch from my armchair. But I needed at least a glass of water.

When I did reach the kitchen, you might imagine my mood. I was pleased with myself and, glancing back through the dim corridors, I could laugh at their blind turns and shadowy corners. I had jumped at empty spaces; vacant rooms had frightened me; but now the whole ordeal seemed ludicrous.

The ghost stories had lost their hold.

However, as anyone who has experienced them will know, these self-confident moments are more fragile than they appear. I had beaten my fiction-inspired terror, but that terror had only been fanning a deeper, instinctual terror, one that continued to growl inside my gut, even as I told myself that ghosts and goblins were not real.

I took a drinking glass down from the cabinet. I poured some water into it. And it took no more this simple process for my victory over the house, and over my nerves, to erode.

Ghosts, I knew, had never been the issue, and neither had the stories I’d been reading. What was stirring deep inside me was not fear of the supernatural world, or even the natural world, but simply and just fear. It was fear that had enshrined me in its tendrils, fear that had crept, not from the room’s corners, but from my own mind’s corners to cloud my vision, and it was fear that made me gulp my water for a reason that I couldn’t grasp. I wanted to leave, to go back upstairs, to lose myself in sleep, and to do this as quickly as possible. It did not matter if there were or were not ghosts; the only thing that mattered was my instinct to escape.

In Japan there is a city called Himeji, and in Himeji there is a castle called Himeji Castle. It is a monumental structure whose keep towers over the surrounding landscape. Some people have said that its architectural wings resemble a bird’s wings spread in flight. It is a famous castle and has been featured in many films, including Akira Kurosawa’s Ran.

On a little lawn beneath the castle’s keep, there is a well. Nowadays it is disused and covered with a metal grate, whose bars you can look through to see down into the well, but you cannot see much. The opening is dark and choked with weeds.

Mounted nearby there is a plaque. It tells a story about a woman who drowned there.

Her name was Okiku and, many centuries ago, she lived as a maidservant in the castle. As maidservants will in old tales, one day she overheard some conspirators whispering about a plot to overthrow the resident lord. The chief conspirator was none other than the castle’s chief retainer. But the lord’s life was saved when Okiku exposed the conspiracy.

However, although his murder plot might have been thwarted, the chief retainer would not permit a maidservant to outwit him. He would have his revenge.

In the castle there were ten treasure plates belonging to the royal family. The chief retainer stole one, smashed it into pieces, and then blamed the theft on Okiku. When she would not confess to what she had not done, he tortured her, and when she would still not confess, he threw her into the well outside the keep. She did not reemerge alive.

After that, her ghost haunted the well, and at night people could hear her voice echoing from deep inside. She was always counting. She would begin with the number one, progress to two and three, and continue until she reached ten. But she would never say the number ten. Instead she would scream as she remembered the tenth treasure plate that she had been blamed for breaking.

This continued until many, many years had passed, and she was enshrined as a local god by a more sympathetic generation. Then her spirit found peace.

At least, that is the account given by the plaque outside the well. But the story has certain illogical elements and raises a few questions.

Why was the chief retainer not executed, imprisoned, or exiled when his conspiracy was exposed? Why was he given the authority to torture Okiku for a confession when he had already proven his disloyalty to the castle’s lord? We might assume that he tortured her in private without permission, but in that case why did he bother to frame her for theft? He might have abducted and murdered her without stealing a treasure plate.

After I had visited the castle and seen the well, I decided to research Okiku’s story. What I found were numerous variations in the legend. Sometimes she was not a maidservant at all, but a courtly lady and the chief retainer’s lover. Sometimes she was the resident lord’s lover. Sometimes there was never any conspiracy to overthrow the castle’s lord, and the chief retainer’s motivation was lust: when Okiku would not submit to his blackmail involving the treasure plates, he murdered her instead. Sometimes Okiku even broke the tenth plate herself to test her lover’s devotion. The only similarity amongst these versions was the splash that her body finally made falling into the well. Even the well’s location changed from legend to legend.

A few nights later, in Osaka, I was talking with a local artist when I decided to ask him what he thought about the legend. He had been born and raised in Himeji and knew all about the castle and its ghosts.

Okiku was a maid, he told me. She was drowned in the well, and her spirit haunted it.

I told him that I knew that much, but what about the murder plot, the treasure plates?

Someone said she stole a treasure plate and broke it, he answered. That’s why she was drowned.

But did the castle’s lord know that she had been accused? Had she really exposed the conspiracy or had the chief retainer killed her first?

There are many theories, he explained. They’re almost like conspiracy theories. But the main thing is that somebody was jealous, and Okiku drowned because of it.

We talked about other subjects after that, and I never did learn the answers to my questions. But what I did learn is that they didn’t need answers. Jealousy and death: these were what mattered the most in Okiku’s legend. Any specifics could pass in and out like phantoms.

Since my exposure to interactive fiction a few months ago, I've shifted my writing time almost exclusively toward text-based games. The first one I wrote was HUNTING UNICORN; the second was Down, the Serpent and the Sun; and I just finished my third game last week.

It's called Toby's Nose and it was written as an entry for Spring Thing 2015. In this game, you play as a dog named Toby helping Sherlock Holmes solve a murder mystery. Toby is featured in Arthur Conan Doyle's original stories, but in those stories and in their subsequent adaptations he has never been featured enough for me. Now there's at least one little parser game where he gets to be the star.

You can play Toby's Nose online here.

You can see all the Spring Thing 2015 entries here. Most are available for download in addition to online play.

To play Toby's Nose, the only commands you need to know are "X [something]" to look at it, "S [something]" to smell it, and "bark at [somebody]" to accuse the murderer. You'll also need to know that typing north, east, southwest, etc., makes you go in those directions, and that typing “I” reveals your inventory.

Besides Toby's Nose, I also wrote a very short game (only 111 words) called creak, creak for Porpentine’s Twiny Jam.

You can play creak, creak online here.

You can see all the Twiny Jam entries here.