THE NATURE OF THE LIVING IS TO FORBID THE DEAD: though they may yet walk among us (a working thesis on traumatic interactive fiction)

TW: C/SA, SUICIDE, SEX WORK

kimono: my game about gender, gang violence, and how sometimes the most horrific, unbearable, and wonderful thing is love

TO BEGIN, A PREFACE, A HISTORY:

i used to be known as FEYXUAN; i now make games as SWANCHIME. the reason for this division has a lot to do with how my understanding of my own trauma, of traumatic interactive fiction in general, and my “decision” of what to do about it for my own sake led me to make.

1. FEYXUAN marks a period of me making games while wandering around blindfolded in the dark and sensing my own traumas by feel and touch but having little to no recollection of what the particular traumas were.

2. SWANCHIME marks the division of hey you know all the stuff i was writing about before. what if it were real haha jk wouldn’t that be wild oh no oh FUCK.

but traumatic interactive fiction in general: i think that most of these games are more visibly autobiographical than mine, for better or worse, in the sense that many people interact with my games as though they are as pure of fiction as naruto in the worst case, or revolutionary girl utena in the most respectful one.

What Do I Mean By That?

• naruto is as pure of fiction as you’ll get, the most famous battle shounen of its heyday, one of the stars of shonen jump. i have actually written a kakashi/obito fangame here because naruto does “handle trauma” in the sense that it presents “traumatic situations where characters as a Concept have C/PTSD from being y’know child soldiers and sole survivors but this isn’t written from or as the autobiography of a child soldier / sole survivor. it’s just traumatic situations for plot or entertainment.”

• revolutionary girl utena is a very flattering comparision because of how stunningly breathtakingly beautiful, delicate, and deeply immersive, convincing, and stellar its hermetic (tightly sealed) symbology is. however, RGU is defined by every action being about crafting a traumatic shoujo fairy tale subversion with deliberate intent as a once-in-a-lifetime collaboration among many minds, not just IKUHARA.

• RGU is a brilliant work of art, spectacular, but not without its own flaws, of course. but from start to finish, rgu is at the end of a day a work of deliberate craft; the crafting of a fictional narrative rather than the story told of a singular (or multiple) soul’s own personal life experiences: i.e. RGU is not an autobiography

i consider my own traumatic fiction to be “fiction” in the same sense that osamu dazai’s no longer human is “fiction” which is to say “extremely transparently a csa survivor’s suicide diary that he wrote under the faintly tethered guise of fiction in order to be able to utter the unspeakable things the record contains at all, because if he were to speak them in the first person and consider them as things that he believed or that happened to himself directly, or to utter such things under that cloak, he would either be totally not believed, shunned, or directly harmed for it.

that is, of course, if such events / happenings were even at all utterable to refer to them as Things That Happened To Oneself, which can frankly be impossible, not just in the sense of an audience refusing and violently rejecting YOU, but also it is easier to create semi-fictional vessels for trauma than it is…to acknowledge they are things that happened to you at all, internally speaking.”

i believe the best traumatic interactive fiction games fall under that category; taylor mccue’s HE FUCKED THE GIRL OUT OF ME most certainly does, in my opinion. this is the game that had such an impact on me i can barely speak about it, i don’t know how to yet, i haven’t even been able to finish it because of how deeply it wrought my soul, but i think it is the best work of traumatic fiction i have ever encountered, and may ever encounter. it is a game about sex work and trauma.

TRAUMATIC INTERACTIVE FICTION HAS THE POWER TO HUMANIZE THE MOST VULNERABLE TO SYSTEMIC AND PERVASIVE DEHUMANIZATION.

that’s why i think it is important to play and to witness and to accept and to believe even the most unspeakable and “unbelievable” things.

a traumatic interactive fiction game is “a world;” the dev’s autobiographical world. the world of their experience, the world of their life.

if you choose to believe it…then i think your heart opens to the depth of breadth of human experience beyond your own.

to understand that traumatized human beings…

are human, too.

IN CONCLUSION:

what i decided and why i split off into SWANCHIME and what my philosophy is going forward making traumatic interactive fiction

it’s because traumatic interactive fiction has the power to humanize the most vulnerable.

in the process of creating a multisensory engaging experience where, to be crude, the player is forced to put themselves in the traumatized person’s shoes, or at least within their consciousness and whatever shape their art took…

in the process of forcing the player to take on the “role” of the traumatized person, it is not only “easier” but “necessary” for them to displace their own identity and agency as “THIS IS A GAME DESIGNED TO CATER TO ME! MY NEEDS! MY TASTES! MY ENTERTAINMENT!” and imagine the horrifying, violent, traumatic world of the dev’s lived experience.

(but kimono for instance is about how such worlds as the world below (the underworld) do contain immeasurable violence. but they also contain immeasurable love and devotion like nothing else.)

a disclaimer i’ve begun to put on my swanchime games is that it is as true as you believe it is true. i hold that these games, these stories, are true stories. but it is up to you how much you believe is “true,” and how much you believe is “fiction.” the truth lies in the ambiguity.

by telling the truth as i know it to be, in the only way i can utter such unspeakable things by designing deep mythos, symbology, and divine curses and enchantments…

by understanding the trauma within my games as unrepressed truths i’ve been trying for years to tell myself, to resolve my own mystery of all those years (MORE THAN HALF MY LIFE!) i can’t remember…

by believing myself, and understanding my own subconscious trying, screaming, begging me to understand and to know and to hold and accept these violences as my own…

the truth is created.

one of my games says a lie is created in the silence of disbelief, and every survivor of immeasurable violence knows what it is like to be disbelieved. but the truth is that by creating these traumatic interactive fictions…

you can come closer to convincing others of the truth, your truth, regardless of it is in a reality “they” live in or know to be true. because by creating these immersive, multisensory, engaging experiences of “games,” these players that might not have wanted to understand you before they witnessed your truth…may be able to find it in their hearts and minds to change the way they think, after witnessing your autobiography in fiction, the truth you could not help but to tell and “realize” (make real).

GO RIGHT! READ RIGHT! THEN RETURN HERE!

TRAUMATIC INTERACTIVE FICTION HAS A POWER LIKE NOTHING ELSE:

the medium permits such things such as a perfectly immersive multisensory simulator/emulator of traumatic experience.

traumatic fiction and traumatic INTERACTIVE fiction are two entirely different beasts.

• interactive fiction as a medium permits a multisensory, forcibly engaging experience at the bare minimum barebones twine requiring you to click a link to proceed

• but the height of traumatic interactive fiction, like in HE FUCKED THE GIRL OUT OF ME, it can become a trauma simulator similar to playing “The Role” of the traumatized person and walking around as that person and experiencing through their lens what the trauma was like.

• i think specifically HFTGOOM is incredible because it was designed in GB studio, which is a gameboy emulator, so it is a game emulating the experience of traumatic sex work within an emulated environment in a historyfuture that could not have existed, but also did and does. there are scenes in HFTGOOM that require you, the player, to walk around and have conversations that the thinly veiled as fiction; they seem far, far too real to me…to have been a pure imagination. the concept of the game, after all, is that it is an unbearably true story.

• (i’ve got to write a review for what emulating trauma through the utilization of “obsolete game engines” has to do with the obsolescence and immense unforgettability of a history that will never leave you, BUT that’s for another time.)

• anyway: interactive fiction requires a degree of sensory / player / reader / audience engagement that the detachment of silent black text on white paper does not give you.

• for me, my interactive fiction is less about the “gameplay” and more about creating a “mirror of the world inside the egg of my heart,” which means that i am realizing (i.e. making real) this hermetically sealed world of deeply intimate and vulnerable divine mythology, enchantment, violence, horror, maiming, love, and hope above all things.

• rather than “gameplay,” my traumatic interactive fiction is about sharing my stream-of-consciousness flashbacks, such as in wretched star, a C-PTSD consciousness simulator about an anti-romance in a mecha pilot world that ends in killing, death, love, and regret, the world of that game is so deeply immersive that the intensity, the immensity of it all, if you read it with an open heart…and read it like dazai’s no longer human…it leaves you no choice but to be shaken to the deep.

(OF COURSE! if you try to read wretched star like naruto, you will get nothing out of it.)