idle hands

I recently contributed to a game with a dozen or so different authors (Mathbrush’s Untitled Relationship Project 1); the various excerpts are all mixed together without attribution, so part of the fun of playing is trying to figure out who wrote which bits. And while I felt reasonably confident in a number of guesses, the ones I was surest of were those by Sophia de Augustine. While their oeuvre has a bunch of recurring motifs – religious imagery, flawed dads, queer love – even when those elements are dialed down, there’s still something instantly recognizable about their prose, and that something is adjectives. Adjectivitis is a curse, of course – I’ve spent a lot of time groaning at fledgling writers’ attempts to pad their prose by making sure every noun has at least one modifier attacked to it – and often it’s good advice to use them sparingly. Sophia’s writing rejects these counsels of caution, however, and winds up distinctively effective by picking exactly the right words, over and over.

That gift is at the heart of what makes Idle Hands successful. A bit of dynamic fiction entered into last year’s Neo-Twiny Jam – which limited games to 500 words or fewer – it recounts the before, during, and after of a bout of love-making with a demonic partner (the timeline shifts around a bit, and also this is the kind of sex where you have more than one go). The focus is on communicating an overwhelming sensory experience, not plot or narrative; you get a bit of a sense of his personality, but this is an element of flavor rather than anything resembling a character study. As dynamic fiction, there’s also nothing by way of player agency or choice – there are a few highlighted phrases that reveal a bit of additional text when moused-over, which serve to engage the player and provide an opportunity for them to feel complicit in opting into the sex, but otherwise you’re just clicking the forward arrow to reach the next passage.

Given the necessary privity of the piece, these are the right choices – constructing context for what brought these people together and what their coupling means, or allowing for different paths through the text, might seem fine enough goals in isolation, but efforts in those directions would come at the immediate expense of the game’s throbbing, fiery heart. So this is a piece set up to live or die by its prose, and fortunately it delivers, a marvel of evocative economy:

"He is all forked silver-tongue and razor-sharp teeth, biting off the rounded, purring edge to his voice with a cessation droning like fruit-drunk wasps at summerly height."

I could write a couple of paragraphs just on why I like this one sentence so much, but I think the strengths are obvious: its descriptions are playfully haunted by the traditional attributes of the devil, makes sure even seemingly-innocuous details like the timbre of a voice have a seductive tinge, and confines itself to just one idiosyncratic bit of vocabulary to make the reader slow down and feel the emphasis proper to the final simile. It’s a dense style, and in a long game might wind up feeling like too much, but the game also does a good job alternating its purplest transports with sacrilegious gags or winking references to boning; it also doesn’t rely on any one trick for too long, opening with a bunch of alliteration before wisely putting that back in the quiver for the rest of the game.

Admittedly there are a few moments where I felt like the writing was so heavily freighted that it threatened to topple over, but only a few, and it always reined things back in: this is a controlled, writerly piece that creates a singular aesthetic experience through well-chosen words (and also through well-chosen colors and visual theming, though as always I feel less qualified to comment on those elements). I can see how some potential players might find schtupping Satan to be an off-putting premise, but those interested in giving it a try will find lots here to enjoy.

[I should acknowledge that Sophia provided a cool banner for my Review-a-Thon thread on the IntFic forum. But a) I’d played the game and formed my opinion of it before I learned that, and b) I think everyone knows that if you want me to write a positive review of your game, bribery is a far less efficient approach than just slathering crypto-Catholic themes all over it, so Sophia’s bases were covered either way]