Taking us through the rest of Sean’s life, Darnielle is similarly equivocal. Sean’s defence is the usual one of creators, that he could never have predicted this - he goes so far as to say, in court, that he would never have even done it, had he known this was possible, although it’s doubtful even he really believes that - but even in his retracing of the steps, he drifts between seeming to know them intimately and recognizing how little he actually understood, the little pieces of them that filtered through never quite giving a picture of the whole. We slowly learn that a pair of Sean’s players have taken the game literally, with one of them ending up dead.
This turns out to be an illusion, though. Article content As we move slowly but surely towards the tragedy, Sean seems even more elusive as the details themselves are laid bare
This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. Though everything has already been carefully mapped, and there is a mechanistic logic to Sean’s responses to each move, he claims to be in a kind of conversation with players, or at least a sort of interrogation that lets him into their heads: the decisions they make - starting with the simple act of being involved in a play-by-mail game in the Internet era - allow Sean to think he is coming to know them, and he teases out their personalities from both their moves and ephemera that finds its way into the margins. He begins only by alluding to some horrible event in his past, one that has left him a disfigured recluse whose chief interaction with the outside world is through Trace Italian, the play-by-mail role-playing game for which he is envelope-stuffing dungeon master.Ĭonceived in the wake of his accident and set in an irradiated, post-apocalyptic America, the goal is for players to make it safely to the eponymous fort, the last safe vestige of humanity - and, as Sean admits, essentially an impossible goal, buried under an almost infinite series of obstacles, each pulled from the filing cabinet he has dutifully organized. It’s all the more telling, then, that Sean, the withdrawn narrator of his first full novel, Wolf in White Van, struggles so much to explain his experience to anyone, even his presumed audience. Manage Print Subscription / Tax Receipt.
0 kommentar(er)
