Notes on Dinner Time At The Café des Lumières

These are some notes on my interactive twine story Dinner Time At The Café des Lumières. You might want to play it before reading, in which case follow the link. You may wish to play afterwards, so I have put a link at the end for your convenience.

Although written to be read in sequence, you are welcome to skip to the bits you think most interesting, so here are the section headings that you might choose from in a menu-like fashion.

There are reasons why I am explaining this in detail, which may become apparent further on.

- Me And Interactive Fiction
- Cause And Effect
- Dinner And Cafés
- Time And Space
- Two And Two Equals Five
- What Is Not Written
- Some Actual Details
- What All This Means
- Have I Learned Any Lessons?
- Conclusion

Me And Interactive Fiction

I don’t recall exactly when I got into the Fighting Fantasy books, but since I recall Robot Commando being new (and having both GIANT ROBOTS and DINOSAURS) it must have been before 1986. I obviously attempted to make my own versions. I don’t think they ever got far beyond writing an introduction, then choosing which big fight you’d get into.

The idea of a game-book, an interactive story, remained rattling around my head. There were TV programs, games, table-top, video, live action, all of which I flirted with in various ways. So when Katy created VOIDSPACE, the online magazine for interactive fiction, and invited me to write something, I had IDEAS and OPINIONS.

Cause And Effect

Generally in Fighting Fantasy, and video games, tabletop roleplaying etc. you choose what happens now, and then play to find out what happens. Your present choices cause future effects.

That’s not the only model. Character creation loosely follows this rule – you choose what your character’s origin is and that creates their present status. Yet an alternative interpretation is that you are here in the present deciding what happened to the character in the past.

My concept, which became The Reading Of The Will Of J Arthur Worthington III, was for your decisions in the present to be dependent on past events, which had shaped your character in such a way as to make you the person who made those present decisions. This would be in the context of attending the reading of a will, so that you would be looking back on your time with J Arthur Worthington III.

This was my first attempt so what actually happens is you arrive at the house, talk to some weirdos, refuse to have anything to do with their plans, then you’re left a 1950s Jag and have to spend the night in a haunted bedroom, before discovering J Arthur Worthington III was your father/boss/rival/lover, depending on your choices. It was a bit opaque. I also figured how to splice together interactive stories in Twine. As a story it’s intermittently successful; as a learning experience for me, it was pretty good.

Dinner And Cafés

A menu is a list of choices. It requires little imagination to literalise this in an interactive story, and you (I) can easily make up for limited imagination with good implementation. Hence, of course, my choice to make this a French bistro, of the sort that is no longer as common as they used to be (when on holiday with my Fighting Fantasy books as reading material) yet they still exist. A predictable menu, good ingredients, cooked excellently.

I’ve played around with a setting, an enormous, labyrinthine, multi-levelled restaurant in a slightly-steampunk* Belle Époque Paris, possibly as the setting for fairy-tale-type stories. This hasn’t worked out (yet), but I do have a detailed description, and an even more detailed idea of what it’s like in my head. So once I was putting this together then the Café des Lumières became the obvious place to set it.

(It’s called a café because at one time the most fashionable restaurant in Paris – perhaps the world – was the Café de Paris. No, not the nightclub.)

Time And Space

The other major idea for an interactive fiction story I was working on after The Reading Of The Will was a space opera story. This goes back to Fighting Fantasy again, they occasionally put out science fiction books. For whatever reason they never managed to put together a single setting, unlike their Fantasy books, which had a slightly incoherent world built around them.

Part of this is because each science fiction book had it’s own gimmick, and that’s what I was planning too. My idea for the story was this; you were the captain of a starship in a Star-Trek-esque universe. You are sitting in a jail cell, waiting for your court martial. Some sort of disaster overwhelmed your ship and to save your crew you broke the law. In fact you broke something else, and your first choice would be; to save everyone did you BREAK SPACE or did you BREAK TIME?

In either case you would visit other crew members, learn about them and your relationship with them, and what led to the disaster. Then there would a courtroom scene and if you broke space, you’d have the chance to leave and break time, or if you broke time, you could go back and break space instead. Or you could accept judgment, which would depend on all your earlier choices

Anyway, I haven’t written that, it didn’t happen. (It might yet).

Two And Two Equals Five

Writing a few notes on the Café des Lumières, I wrote the soup of the day section. This would have concluded with the start of an awkward conversation with the dinner companion. I was planning to put in a first sketch of who the companion was, and from that decide/discover a little more of who the narrator was. But then I realised the companion was eating soup from another day of the week, as they were lost in time. The two people having dinner are not spouses, friends, lovers, family, none of that. They are lab partners whose project has broken time.

(In my brief time as a scientist I had several lab partners, and if the companion is based on anyone from that period, it’s me.)

So far so good. You go to a restaurant, you order something, the dish is analogous to some aspect of the project, which derives from the character of your companion, which says something about the relationship of the two of you, and also how the project broke time, which in a circular manner, is why you ordered it. I can write this, I thought (I was proved right). I can describe the food, and how it relates to people and, and a time project.

What I couldn’t do, quite, on a screen or sheet of paper, was figure out how the final conversation came together.

What Is Not Written

I don’t have the failures, the incomplete drafts, the dead ends, the broken code and the scattered discards. Suffice to say that almost as soon as Reading Of The Will was published in VOIDSPACE Issue 1 I began work on what was to become Dinner Time. It eventually appeared in Issue 4, 10 months later.

So if this seems daunting, if this sounds too difficult for you to do, know that it was too difficult for me too. I had to try and fail and fix and redraft. And here is a good place to acknowledge the help of mumbles** who tested an early version of it. She made a few comments including “a little more dialog pointing to where it’s going would be rad,” which had me move some of the explanation forward, and generally adjust the pacing. The situation is weird, I don’t need to keep it obscure.

And here I’m going to lift another layer of obscurity, explain what is happening in the story/game/code. It may not be my job to encourage you to make your own Twines (or other interactive stories) but it’s definitely not my place to discourage you, to make it seem difficult or esoteric. If you want to have a go, take a look at the VOIDSPACE handy tools page***, and keep at it until you have something interesting.

Some Actual Details

The first three courses work exactly the same way. You pick one of three options and it gives you the page I wrote. It also records the option you took as a variable.

Things change up for the dessert course. Each dessert tells us something important about the project and how it was put together. And finally you and your companion can have a conversation about it.

That conversation is different based on what you ordered before. So the opening of the conversation depends on the starter, the middle section on the fish, which is where what went wrong is discussed. Then based on the main, your companion incompletely, and obnoxiously, tries to diagnose exactly what is happening and you disagree with them. As I said, they’re not directly based on anyone, except possibly me.

Every dessert has a different set of conversational results, so there are a lot of permutations. In fact you have to go through it nine times, just to see every possible paragraph. (As I had to reconstruct**** when I was proofing it; six weeks between submission and testing had blunted my memory of how it works).

This put paid to one ending; I had the four different methods of payment (you get the same paragraph every time) but had intended to lay out what happened with an a la carte choice. Too complicated, not designed for that. Instead it just takes you back to the start.

The final choice, how you pay (or don’t), is how you as a character respond to the story. Think carefully on this if you’re going to play.

What All This Means

Obviously this is still obscure. In the story I’m offering you dinner, then telling you that your choice reflects how you and your companion worked on a project that broke time. That’s not how cause and effect works! It's broken.

I think this marries structure and story more successfully than my first try in The Reading Of The Will.

What it doesn’t do is tell you where your choice of food most effects your experience. It’s not transparent in how many options there are, or if you might want to go back if you’re curious (or unsatisfied with your first outcome). In crude game dev terms, I’ve not communicated the replayability. Or looking at it another way, I’ve done quite a bit of extra work for very little payoff, when I could have used smoke and mirrors to disguise two or three conversations as a larger constellation of options.

That’s okay. The hard part was working out how to make Twine do what I want, to fit the outline structure in my head. The rest is grinding out lots of words to fill in the slots I’ve created. And as it turns out I made myself a template; I have the voice I’m writing in from the earlier sections, and I have two prompts, the dessert the conversation is taking place over and the menu item (and project/relationship meaning that implies) that the reader has already selected. This is work, but it doesn’t require me to start from scratch every time.

Have I Learned Any Lessons?

A game requires a bit more initial clarity than a piece of fiction. I should inform a player what they’re supposed to be doing*****. This guides them as they propel themselves forward.

People like descriptions of food. They’re more ambivalent on projects that break time. Is sitting in a restaurant discussing time too mind-bending? Or perhaps not mind-bending enough? Could it be a kaleidoscope of changing settings and experiences?

The simple clarity of options is good, and even if it has unintended consequences, at least ordering things from the menu offers predictable start (the food). The running – joke? interruption? – of the sommelier is fun.

More planning before opening up Twine results in a more streamlined coding session, and perhaps counterintuitively offers more space for improvisation. For example knowing clearly what I wanted the story to do let me play around with fonts and colours, even if I eventually went for boring black on white and segoe script font in an effort to look like a generic printed menu.

In Conclusion

I thought breaking time would be fun. I thought having dinner is a good thing. I thought combining them might be an interesting story.

I think I was right. You can make up your own mind.

 

* Belle Époque, the period between the Franco-Prussian War and World War One, is of course already effectively Steampunk, being the same time as the Late Victorian and Edwardian periods in Britain. Still, if I say that this is the Paris that Jules Verne might have written about you’ll get what I mean.

** On nom d’internets: “this website is incredible because there are people i’ve known for years and yet i have no idea what gender they are or what they even look like. their gender is Friend and their appearance is No” https://twitter.com/muchnerve/status/1512134587132096514

*** mumbles is making things in bitsy, an editor for games where you walk and talk to people, it’s free and open source and has a community and game jams, check it out

**** If you are curious to see everything then you need to go through each dessert three times, in every case picking different items off the menu for each course. So Soup-Fruit de Mer-Confit, Crudites-Trout-Steak, Pate-Fishcake-Coq au vin, for each dessert choice. I would lay them out for you, but this is the point I went from writing options to coding in Twine; the dessert conversations were first written into the Twine box, then edited there. I could, of course, extract them, but I think it’s better to leave them as they are.

***** This is a generalisation (a game that’s a mystery is fine, a story that signals what it’s doing from the start can work well) and also specifically a lesson for me (who likes to withhold a twist, surprise, revelation or turning point to the end of a story – at one time I liked to make everything turn on the last sentence, or better still the last word. I don’t do that all the time, but it’s a technique I return to). Maybe you are learning different lessons, or none at all