Ordering Chaos: making a gameish entity

Is it Time to Write Yet?   

Between scripting, organizing assets, and contemplating game mechanics, I'm trying to set more time aside for the very reason I'm making a game in the first place: experimenting with narrative. I've made use of the apartment walls, in a somewhat limited capacity: sticking things to them in various combinations.

Working on narrative has sadly taken a bit of a back seat to building the game (which is hard work!). But as I'm advancing, the whole process has me wondering... what do I really need to get my teeth into the writing? Do I need a tidy system that lets me slot in bite-sized snippets of text? Or do I need something chaotic? Walls covered in ideas, until the most engaging ones jump out, and stick to my sweater... land in my soup.

A (personal) historical look at meaningful chaos

Back in 2007, a half-year stay in Toronto had me living at the infamous street number 18 1/2 (with no neighbouring 18). It was a time-piece, a museum erected in honour of its long-time guests, the nugget of an intensely interesting community (anarchists, I liked to believe). Sometime in the 80's, the Universe had split itself open in the living room, at a party perhaps, and swallowed half of the house. A family of raccoons chewed on the remains of the missing half, in their basement nest.

It was a house of cobwebs, where half a giant plastic horse was forever jumping out of the living room wall. A mosaic of broken mirrors lined the stairwell, so that every time I went upstairs, my clothing snagged against it. My sublet room was past the shared upstairs bathroom. My bay window, with its missing third, was covered with a thin sheet of plastic that breathed calmly against the cold Toronto winter.

A colleague came to pick me up one day, and upon seeing the electricity crackling along the surface of the walls, said, a bit under her breath... that a clean house was for her, a clear mind. I could understand that. For me a clean bath was a clear mind. The bath here was painted black. For the length of my stay here, I could never quite tell how clear anything was, least of all in my mind.

Conclude and Contrast

Since that time, I often find myself thinking about what this colleague said. I was attracted to 18 1/2: to the half remaining, and to the missing half. Despite the calm of my current living-space, and how I relish this deep quiet, I still search for small concentrations of any kind of crackling chaos. Somewhere between quiet moments of reflection, and memories of the beloved (now departed) half-house, is an illustration of how the clarity of perspective sometimes emerges from a harsh contrast.

Messiness organized, deconstructed, reconstructed. Not the perfect perch, the middle ground, the method that will tackle all methods, but rather a variety of experiences, and observations, attempts to see what comes together, and what sticks, and what falls apart, and how beautifully it might hold together or crumble.