Simon Jacobs is the author of SATURN, a collection of David Bowie stories, out now from Spork Press.
His story, "The Inventory of Marcus, Level 16," appeared in Issue Fifty-Four of The Collagist.
Here, he speaks with interviewer Keaton Maddox about world creation, glitches, and archetypal authenticity.
Traditional Role-Playing Games (RPG), like Dungeons and Dragons, rely on a system of constricted mutual storytelling in order to create a vivid and richly character driven world. Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG), on the other hand, provide users with a more concrete world from the get go, only really giving them the capability to define their place within it, rather than allowing them to build the society as a whole. Demon Keep functions as an MMORPG in your story, both literally and metaphorically, yet you, as the writer, made the world from scratch, more in the vein of a more traditional RPG. What was your process for creating the reciprocal realities of online and real life we see in your story without the constraints of a more formal meaning-making system being provided to you, as would have been the case were you actually playing an RPG?
Demon Keep is totally a Diablo II clone, all the way down to how many items you can equip at once, so I had this framework and vocabulary very explicitly in mind for the game’s mechanics/interface/level design/etc. I wanted to give my invented game a legacy, too, to root it in the same space as the older Diablo games et al, as those RPGs that still have people roaming the universe 10 or 15 years after the fact. It’s an old, weird, buggy game (Marcus and Nikki wouldn’t bond over something that’s contemporarily popular), and I wanted the game itself to be a kind of aesthetic throwback in a story that is full of aesthetic throwbacks.
And as a probably 300 hour-strong player of Morrowind and other games like that, I was more than familiar with the ways that a few smallish bugs in the software could fuck you over (items/enemies not generating where they were supposed to, the game’s logistics not tripping in their designated spots, etc) - the glitches are part of what make the games what they are! So I wanted to create a game whose very reasonable gamesy problems became translatable/mappable on the story in ‘real time.’
When I came up with the title “Demon Keep” I was amazed it wasn’t a game already. I think I settled on one of the few combinations of “supernatural entity + gloomy/arcane noun” that hasn’t been scooped yet.
Nikki in this role should be a cliché, which is something the narrator even directly acknowledges. Yet, despite her archetypal positioning, I never questioned her authenticity. She becomes this convoluted vessel for Marcus’ sovereignty, claiming he is absolutely autonomous, while guiding him into her own solidarity. How did you balance her function in the story as Marcus’ conduit for self-actualization with her need to be an independent freely thinking character? How did you reconcile Marcus’ becoming more like Nikki as a means of establishing his own individuality?
I just tried to let Nikki be Nikki—clearly Marcus is messily enamored with her and wants to be educated in all of her counter-cultural ways, but I feel like part of his development in the story is realizing that he’s not 100% built for it, that their relationship isn’t some perfect magical fit, and maybe no one is exactly what they seem. He might get as much from the game as he does from Nikki. At its core, it’s just a story about suburban high school alienation and the ways you variously make sense of a world that doesn’t really make sense (or maybe brutally does make sense).
My favorite addition to Nikki’s character, personally, was the dog tags—like, that’s something you’d get stamped at a birthday party. It is something you found cool in exactly that one moment.
The keyboard symbol images at the beginning of each section are a beguiling addition to the piece. They contribute to the stories uniqueness and memorability without ever feeling like a gimmick or a parlor trick. What was your process like for creating and including them in your story?
Very painstaking experimentation with the Courier font, basically—there was no special engineering to it. I had sketches for each item as I was writing up drafts of the story, and they helped to serve as sort of thematic anchors as I pieced things together. I also wanted to give readers a visual sense of the relative size of each item and how they would all together fill the “squares” and “armor parts” of a typical Diablo-style RPG inventory—conveniently, they also help to visually break up what is kind of a long and rambly story, and ultimately work as a reality-crossing mechanism to integrate ‘the game’ with “real life.” The illustrations are really kind of an anachronism, too, because there’s no way an in-game object would look this shitty/basic in a genuine, popular RPG from the late 90s/early 2000s.
What are you reading right now?
A bunch of things! Here are few of them:
Unspeakable Things (Bloomsbury) - Laurie Penny on gender, class, and uprisings; no one can come up with an indignant metaphor like Laurie Penny.
Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy (Verso) - Gabriella Coleman’s analysis of the Anonymous movement. It’s really juicy.
Videogames for Humans (Instar Books) - a collection of annotated Twine games by various creators, all brought together by Merritt Kopas. Of course I’m reading it!
What projects are you currently in the process of writing?
I just finished a novel, which is exciting. It’s called PALACES—I’m writing the title here so I can’t change it again. It’s also kind of games-y, in that it involves procedurally-generated landscapes and respawning. I am really eager to get it out there.
I also write a monthly series for the Paper Darts newsletter called “Masterworks,” which is about reenactments of famous works of art. You can sign up for that here.