AN OUTCRY POSTMORTEM #1: Thematics. A Year of Birdness or: How to feel better about failing as an exorcist

Thematics || Mechanics & Schematics || Economics

Imagine you are a writer. But not just any kind! The "suffering" kind. Self-serious, full of lament. You write not just to tell stories and express ideas, but also as a form of self-exorcism, to snuff the fire of your emotions by externalising and talking about them.

The words hit the paper, and you feel better; the feeling is sorted.

Now, imagine you've been thinking about, sketching out, and writing a story for the good part of 5 years; a story about matters that are a weight on your mind like nothing else, like some insurmountable grief - matters more serious even than the extreme emotions and mental health issues you'd been writing about prior, bigger than sadness, bigger than you. The sadness of millions, the fear of both those like you and different. A spectre weighing on the zeitgeist.

A story that means so much to you that you keep it close even after it nearly died twice.

The story survives the worst break-up of your life, and running out of money, twice.

Now, imagine that story is done, when it seems it never would be--

but the spectre is not exorcised. They remain, and grow.

What would you do?

Would you know that your old frame of reference does not apply to something that important? Or would you feel like you have failed?

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This is more or less how having finished An Outcry is like, one year later - at least from the selfish, introspective perspective.

When in late 2016, I first wrote a short twine sketch and opened it with a Franz Kafka quote, I thought that's what An Outcry would be: A hypertext adventure nobody would play, not unlike my first game "Ah".

Now, we've sold several thousand copies across Itch and Steam, we've been shortlisted and nominated for awards, we've been interviewed a lot about this one little game.

And yet... the exorcism failed.

The spectre weighs, still.

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This will come to no surprise for anyone despite my slight coyness on the matter in most interviews, but let me word-of-god this:

original character bio from the first version

An Outcry is a game about the rise of the alt-right. It is a game about fascism, the shapes it takes, where it festers and grows, how it works, whom it kills and how, whose companionship it seeks and who it preys on to its own ends.

The Shrikes are hardly a subtle metaphor, and were never supposed to be subtle in the slightest. Jeff Vandall was explicitly chosen as the Manshrike's voice because they are a stage actor, and because they do a decent Ben Shapiro impression. Their speech is full of dog whistles. Their signature laugh - "keh keh keh" - is a slightly adjusted version of the way 4chan fascists use "kek". Hell, even the "Maybe it's a metaphor?" question the Unnamed asks is put there with intent.

Why would you write like that - write in a way that foregoes subtext? Are you Garth Merenghi? Well... Maybe a little, but no.

The truth is that I vehemently wanted to reach people with An Outcry. Metaphor is ambiguous, a hand, untipped. I wanted to play this deck straight, because I knew that a lot of people were affected by this poison the alt-right dishes out; millions more than myself.

A problem people need to know about, acknowledge. A hurt that needs to be heard.

I'd read a lot of Bertolt Brecht; his work and theoretical texts. "Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it", he is quoted as saying.

I always felt like Brecht failed in a few regards with his theatre concept, and as work on An Outcry proved to me, it was because his medium wasn't interactive.

Nothing lets you live life from the perspective of another more effectively than a video game. Nothing else could show people more effectively what the rise of fascism is like to see from our perspective.

If anything could reach people, it would be this.

And... well. Their advance continues; few people played us, and even so, we are just a video game. We are a product; we are not activism. My hateful head continues to scream as the shadows continue to close in.

And yet...

Every so often, I would stumble upon these reviews by conflicted people; people whom An Outcry threw off-center, whom it made reflect.

a review on backloggd

Writing is a good way of managing my own emotions, but despite what Brecht said, it's no tool to change the world. Not anymore.

But it can reach some people - and that may be more important than I like to give it credit to.

-Quinn

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This is the first in a series of three post-mortems on An Outcry. Check out the others when they're done.