Shrouded with fog and surrounded by seaborne chickens, the tail of the big plane slowly SINKS beneath the calm, uniform water.

Maynard does what he can to stay afloat and to head in the direction of a beach close by.

EXT. BEACH – EARLY MORNING

Night has passed. The water remains unperturbed and consistent, hugging a beach cut like a space invader out of a sandy shore. On the beach we see scattered materials. And we see, upright, half-buried in sand, a MAN IN A BLUE SHIRT.

Maynard.

A pig grunts nearby, bumping into Maynard’s face. Maynard throws up. Slowly he jumps out of the sand. Vomits seawater, big heaves. The water lands on the sand and spreads out to form a small lake. Maynard is washed aside by it. He jumps on a terrace of dirt. Dazed. Still confused. Where am I? What happened?

Maynard’s first instinct is to check the time. He looks at his wrist, sees nothing but a pink stump.

Then he looks around, and we look with him.

MAYNARD’S POV – BEACH

The render distance has increased fog has dimmed. We can see trees and additional trees of the same type leading back into a uniformly wooded valley climbing up a steep, rocky hillside. Actual coal ore is visible in the rock. The rocks on the opposite point end in a barren ridge with a cave. Clouds hide the top of the hill.

ON MAYNARD

as he takes in his surroundings. He licks his lips. He’s not thirsty, but he does enjoy licking his lips at the most inopportune of times. But something he sees is even more important.
We stay with him as he JUMPS UP AND DOWN THE DIRT. He arrives at his MATERIALS on the sand, picks one up, brushes off the sand, walks farther. He picks up another ITEM.

EXT. BEACH – WIDE

Maynard walks down the beach, picking up bundles of sticks and cobblestone, without leaving a trail in the sand. Ahead of him we notice a wooden chest with a purely decorative lock.

EXT. BEACH – LATER THAT MORNING

Maynard has placed neat stacks according to block type next to a branched tree at the rim of the beach. He examines the Wooden Chest with passing curiosity, then shoves sand beneath himself while making little jumps, until he can reach and put the chest on top of the cobblestone stack.

Maynard sits down in the shade, makes himself comfortable, and waits.

EXT. BEACH – SUNSET

Maynard is still waiting. He’s a systems man, and the system isn’t working.

MAYNARD

All right, guys. I'm here. Check the GPS, get moving.

The full moon shines a ghostly light on the beach. Trees cast moon-shadows on the sand. Maynard seems very, very alone.

We HEAR from the darkness a STRANGE NOISE. Rustling in the leaves. A stream of water, or is it someone shushing? A jolt of adrenaline courses through Maynard’s body. He jumps four terrace levels higher and looks around him.

We HEAR the noises again. Maynard edges toward the rocks at the barb of the hook. Looking frantically around him, he bends down and picks up a sapling. His first weapon.

In the grass he finds a flower. He tries to pick it up in his other hand, but somehow it ends up on his belt with the stone pickaxes and several tons of cobblestone. He backs between two rocks and stands facing the dark, every sense alert. A cloud passes over the moon. The absence of shadow adds unease to Maynard’s already anxious face.

BANG!

EXT. BEACH – MORNING

It’s almost like there is no tide on this island. We find Maynard, disheartened amidst the rocks, staring out to sea. The empty sea.

MAYNARD

Where the fuck are you?

After last night, he desperately needs food. We WALK with Maynard up the beach.

Beneath the trees he sees a couple of sheep. He circles one of them and studies it. It has a strange face, almost like a skull. How to kill it?

He attempts to grab the sheep, but finds himself unable to. He drives the sheep between two rocks, then throws cobblestone at it. The cobblestone ends up stuck to the opposing rock. Maynard tries to take the cobblestone back. It won’t come loose. He punches the sheep out of sheer frustration. The sheep instantly sheds all its wool.

MAYNARD

Sonofabitch.

The sheep wanders off, bleeting and naked.

Maynard picks up the cloth, tests the fabric. Soft—really soft. He punches another sheep, and it releases one block of cloth. He punches another sheep. Then again, harder. And again. Then he whips them with sticks. More cloth! Then, seeing this cloth sitting amongst his sticks, he notices something.

He has a painting.

PUNCHING SHEEP – SERIES OF SHOTS

Maynard still has nothing to eat, but he does have a painting.

Maynard finds other livestock and punches them in the face.

A cow. No luck.

A chicken. No luck.

Maynard runs wildly up to a pig whilst waving a flower about.

Maynard brings the flower down hard on the pig, blood spurts across its pink hide. Success! The flower comes down mercilessly again and again, until the pig splatters apart and nothing is left apart from a steak.

MAYNARD

That was smart, really smart.

Bringing the steak to his mouth, he realises he should probably cook it first. Hungry as he is, however, he decides to take the steak as it is and heartily gobbles it up, and drinks some of the water.

MAYNARD

Ahhh.

EXT. BEACH – SUNRISE

Maynard squints at the ocean. His sunburn is bad—his lips are cracked. Stacks of white cloth lie beside him. No one’s there—again.

MAYNARD

Maybe the GPS malfunctioned. That plane did.

At the horizon he can see the sun come up. Something’s not right. The sun can be seen through the water, and looks to be more or less the shape of a vinyl album sleeve.

MAYNARD

Okay, do the math. They know you are within the surface area of the Earth. That's an oblate spheroid with a surface area of, uh, 2pi times a squared, uh, sin uh, so, uh, about 2 billion times two. That's 4 billion square km. Eight times the surface of the Earth.

This sinks in. Then Maynard gets an idea.

MAYNARD

They could use a cartographer.

But even that doesn’t give him much hope.

MAYNARD

Say each cartography sample covers 100 by 100 meters, that's uh...fuck it...gigabytes of samples.

That sinks in.

MAYNARD

Wait, what did I just say?

EXT. BEACH – NIGHT

Maynard sleeps by the sheep cloth. Twilight sets in. Maynard stirs, gets up, staggers over to a tree to relieve himself.

He stares idly out at the moonlight on the waves. Then not so idly. Something’s out there, something floating on the tide.

MAYNARD

What the hell?

EXT. BEACH – MOMENTS LATER

Maynard splashes into the gentle surf, reaches the dark object.

It’s the pilot’s body. Maynard goes pale as a sheet. It moans.

MAYNARD

Oh Jesus.

EXT. BEACH – MOMENTS LATER

Maynard jumps his way back to the beach, followed non-chalantly by the undead pilot. Arriving at the beach, Maynard takes one of the stone pickaxes from his belt and considers the horror of what he has already decided to do.

MAYNARD

I'm so sorry, Al. So sorry.

EXT. BEACH – MORNING

Maynard has almost finished a grave in the sand behind a tree. He’s been digging with a stick tied to a plank.

The body is gone. Maynard stares at the feathers where there used to be a body.

MAYNARD

What?

He wants to say more, can’t. He scoops some sand over the feathers.

MAYNARD

Got to cover Al up.

He scoops in some more sand. It’s eerily like burying the parrot in his back yard.

EXT. BEACH – LATER

Maynard, using the last planks, places a crude signpost into the sand as a grave marker. “Al”, Maynard wrote, “1968 – 2010, he was not always a zomb” and ran out of space.

EXT. BEACH – LATER THAT DAY

As Maynard sits on the beach, he half-sings, half-talks “Zombie” by the Cranberries very quietly to himself.

MAYNARD

In your head, in your hea-ea-ea-head..

He looks over at the deep woods and down to the rocky point. Comes to a decision. He takes another bite of steak, picks up his sapling, sticks the stone pickaxe in his pants. He’s ready to go.

EXT. BEACH – DAY – MOMENTS LATER

Maynard jumps over the rocks and disappears out of sight. He’s still half-singing to himself.

MAYNARD

And the violence caused such silence..

EXT. ISLAND – DAY – MOMENTS LATER

Maynard’s way is blocked by rocks and gravel. He hesitates. He picks up a rock and SMASHES IT against the bad things. It collapses the gravel and reveals a cave. He takes a step inside.

Previously I generated some simple graphs modelling the positive/negative mood in stories. Basic stuff, but interesting and possibly eliciting continued explorations in text parsing and narrative structure (which, if you read anything I throw out, you’ll find entirely missing). I tried finding similar yet less frivolous examples of what I was doing, being sure the idea must have been explored thoroughly by others, and I did find many examples. If you’re interested at all, googling ‘automated text analysis’ will get you underway.

In any case, I was watching episode 9 of the HBO show Game of Thrones (based on the A Song of Ice and Fire books by George R. R. Martin).  The episode was intense and left me thinking: “I’d like someone to tell me that things are going to be OK.” From what people were saying I had the impression that the story might not have any mercy on me. I’ve complained many times that writers should have more courage in this way, and now I am the victim of my desire.

If I’m going to keep following this show, I want to know that things are going to be OK in the end. I didn’t want anyone to unintentionally convey more than I wanted to know, but remembered the text parsing I had done and decided to run the script on the Game of Thrones book. I haven’t read it, but the show is apparently faithful to the book.

Note: the book is not in the public domain and I am not making any of the text available.

Story progression based purely on positive/negative word counts

The answer to “is everything going to be OK?” appears to be: “yes, sort of, yeah”. There are shiploads of dark and cruel things occurring from about 40% into the book, then a relief at 75% through before being hit again by what appears to be the most intensely dramatic part of the book, yet ending in a (hopefully) hopeful ending.

For further illustration, here are versions of the graph with counts per 25000 and per 10000 lines respectively rather than per 20000 above.

To see the below graph in full, click the image:

What this doesn’t show is whether things are going to be resolved in a satisfying manner. More specifically, and perhaps this is all I should have done, the parser doesn’t look for “and so Tyrion was the only surviving Lannister”.

I wrote a simple parser which evaluates a given text based on two collections of keywords, one collection of words indicating a positive, up-beat tone and the other collection indicating a negative, dramatic tone. I then graphed the results.

Let’s start by looking at fairy tales:

Hansel and Gretel by the brothers Grimm

As you can see, a negative mood prevails at the start of the story. It’s a poor household and a terrible plan is hatched. Hansel and Gretel are abandoned, twice, but Hansel is optimistic and pragmatic. Things don’t look too bad. However, they grow increasingly hungry and tired, and if that wasn’t bad enough they meet an old woman who prefers to eat children rather than candy. However, everyone lived happily ever after. Except the witch. And the mother.

Little Red Riding Hood – the version by the brothers Grimm

This graph doesn’t work as well, since it is a very short story, but is fairly accurate. The reason the negativity doesn’t appear until the end is because Little Red Riding Hood is happily on her way to her grandmother, with the only outspoken drama when the wolf “ate her up”, which does not trigger my parser. Only towards the end do the horrors come out in the open.

Let’s take a quick detour to larger stories before revisiting fairy tales in a comparison of Disney and the original versions.

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Pride and Prejudice appears to be entirely up-beat! Well, let’s have another look, now making the positive series transparent.

That looks better (i.e. worse).

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

Accurate? I haven’t read the novel, but the plot is far darker than this graph indicates. Perhaps Dickens uses a vocabulary which is not well covered by the collections of words I’ve used.

Now, let’s move from Dickens to Disney.

The Little Mermaid (transcript of the Disney animation, 1989)

Something terrible peeking up in the middle there. Now let’s compare this to the original, which is supposed to be rather more brutal.

The Little Mermaid by Hans Christian Andersen

Strikingly similar, really. Can anyone tell me what the negative event halfway through is?

Snow White (transcript of the Disney animation, 1937)

Disney’s version has a very clear and simple story arc much like Vonnegut’s first graph.

Snow White (by the brothers Grimm)

A significant difference. Grimm’s version is balanced and, well, more grim compared to the Disney script, though still leading to a happy end.

Mirror’s Edge

(2009, metacritic 81, user score 8.2, 1+ million copies sold)

Grand Theft Auto IV

(2008, metacritic 90, user score 4.5, 6+ million copies sold)

Additionally, being a console-to-PC port, the controls are clunky. Not much realism is left when you run into the side of a door, then run into the other side of the door, then walk away from the door and try to align yourself perfectly with the door so that you may finally manage to actually walk through it.

Bioshock

(2007, metacritic 96, user score 8.1, 1+ million copies sold)

Empire: Total War

(2009, metacritic 90, user score 6.7, unknown number of copies sold)

Civilization IV

(2005, metacritic 94, user score 7.6, 3+ million copies sold)

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

(2009, metacritic 86, user score 2.3, 4.7 million copies sold on first day)

Doom 3

(2004, metacritic 87, user score 70, 3.5+ million copies sold)

The Lennon Sisters – Dry Bones

The Ink Spots – Do I Worry?

Tiny Tim – The Other Side

Elvis Presley – Heartbreak Hotel

Les Baroques – Such A Cad

photo credit: nblumhardt

The rabbit magistrates conferred.

At the conclusion of the meeting, they resolved to write a law so convoluted and prolix, that no bunny or fox or human could ever hope to read or comprehend it in their lifetime. The rabbit magistrates would thus be able to make any judgment they wanted in whatever situation and have no-one to answer to. Two thousand bucks were put to work devising the Great Law. Not one of them was allowed to take a break or get fresh air, because that could increase the clarity of the document, something to be avoided at all costs. The bucks survived on sandwiches with lettuce and twigs, and only keystrokes were heard, incessantly.

It wasn’t long, though, until a not even educated young buck called Zirkem started to paw through the Law in his free time. He went through it very slowly and meticulously, concentrating on just one subparagraph spanning 215 pages. It took him two months, and after those two months he dug his way out of his mountain of notes and made an announcement to his doe-eyed compatriots: each bunny, by law, is entitled to a ration of 3300 balloons.

For almost a week, life was perfect. Every morning saw the arrival of truck convoys bringing thousands upon thousands of balloons in every colour imaginable. The world became balloons and there were many surprise encounters whilst playing and living life amongst them, often leading to new families, because that’s the rabbit way. A lively trade started in rare balloons, and all rabbits regardless of responsibilities felt they were living a life of leisure in the comfortable embrace of countless balloons.

Clearly it couldn’t last. It was no fun for the magistrates. They no longer had sway over the populace with all those balloons obscuring the bunnies’ whereabouts and activities. They called upon exception f to the subparagraph covering the ration of balloons, which was not included in or referred to from the subparagraph, but included in a different chapter and referring back to it. The exception supposedly stated that only bunnies who were diagnosed with balloon deficiency could own balloons. The bunnies, tearful about losing their precious balloons, called upon Zirkem to confirm the tenor of the exception.

Zirkem started to study the Law once more, but gave up after just one page. Instead he paid a visit to his doctor and found him willing to diagnose every single bunny with balloon deficiency who visited his office. And so the Great Queue started.

A day later the magistrates announced a 26 layers deep subparagraph of the initial subparagraph which states that balloon deficiency, being contagious, is to be eradicated by extracting the brains from every affected bunny and anyone who has ever come in contact with them. The bunny doctors refused to abide by this law. The magistrates announced all doctors were to be forced. The bunny police refused. The magistrates announced police were to do their duty or receive no lettuce whatsoever. The bunny farmers snuck them lettuce. The magistrates announced that a footnote of the penultimate paragraph states that rabbit magistrates, in case of anarchy, are allowed to live a life of outrageous excess on an island of their choosing.

And so they did. The rabbit magistrates lived happily ever after.

The bunny populace, on the other hand, lived a life of simple pleasures in their balloon world. It lasted almost a week. Then a particular kindle of rabbits mischievously popped a few balloons and it became all the rage to be a Popper. When all the ground was covered in the deflated remains of once beautiful balloons, it was impossible to grow or find food. Gradually all bunnies died unspeakably horrific deaths, with only the most wicked cannibals surviving for any significant amount of time. Blood and entrails and balls of fluff and torn plastic littered the landscape.

The original Half Life sold 8 million copies, which means that at least 8 million people have been employed at Black Mesa Research Facility as a theoretical physicist. None of the millions of players ever saw each other, or talked to each other, but they were all asked to assist in a not so theoretical experiment and for all players that experiment was a disaster. Each one of us followed the same route out of the building. Each one of us was startled by a headcrab jumping at us out of nowhere. Each one of us took in the sights of the Planet Xen on our hostile little trip there. With some people it’s perhaps the only memories you share.

In real life I’ve visited Rome as a tourist and at some point took a picture of the Colosseum from the same angle as thousands of others have undoubtedly done, but I’ve also besieged virtual Rome like millions of others. I’ve taken its walls with massive siege towers hoping for them not to catch fire, unloading early legionary cohorts on defenders belonging to a different Roman family until they routed to the city centre where they made a final stand alongside their general.

Obviously the more linear a game is, the more similar the experience. Every player has to complete the same succession of steps in the right order to progress in most graphic adventure games. Some other games, however, have different endings based on the decisions you make.

The most unique experience, I think, would be accomplished by a game that is both massively multi-player and very sandbox. But at that point it stops being a game and starts being a Second Life. In any case, there is no reason why the shared experience should be an issue. Books are too, as well as films and tv series. Games are just more of an experience in the sense that you’re an active actor in the story. That is why the aspect of determination is relevant. Let me create some more shared memories by following in your footsteps in SW:KOTOR or perhaps S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

photo credit: trec_lit

It had no yolk or albumen, just an inflatable swimming pool and plastic books.

I learned to stack a plastic book on another plastic book. This made a tower, and it was more useful than plastic books.
I learned to deflate the swimming pool. This made a moist parachute, and it was more useful than a swimming pool.
Then I climbed up the tower and jumped off wearing a moist parachute. This made me cry. It wasn’t pleasant.

Then an egg appeared in my egg.

I told the new egg to disappear.
It refused.
I told it again.
It refused again.
I told it to stop refusing.
It refused.

I put the new egg in the tower.
I made a balloon out of the parachute.
I blew up the balloon until it blew up.

With the tower and the egg and the balloon blown up, there was nothing left but me. I felt considerably worse off.

Eventually, 8 years later, a bounty hunter broke me out of my egg. He was disappointed to see me.
“Sorry”, he said, “Wrong egg.”

In exchange for orange juice, I helped him look for the right egg. He had some quality orange juice to give away.

Henry M. loves dnL. He loves it so very much that when he learned the product was going to be discontinued, he bought all the remaining stock in his town’s supermarkets and stored it in a cupboard, where his camping equipment used to be (and a dead bird, which upset Henry M., as it was still alive when he last took out his camping gear a year or two previous).

The bird in question:

As an aside, did you know dead birds don’t really smell?

Dead birds dry up quickly, and stay remarkably intact when kept in a cool and dry cupboard in a house kept aggressively free from flies (Henry M. told passionate stories about his legal war against insects).

Every month, Henry M. would treat himself to one of the bottles of dnL.

This is not our Henry M:

It’s a different Henry M. instead. To get back on the subject of cupboards, Henry M. once hid inside his dnL storage cupboard. It was a retreat for him, a place of escape and control and feeling at home. Much like so:

Henry M. had depleted 2 crates of dnL by the time he hid in the cupboard, according to his rule of one bottle per month plus a fair share of them due to a losing streak of self-discipline vs. addiction. With those 2 crates gone, he could fold himself into the space now available to him in the cupboard, and hid there for what he described as “half the freakin’ day”, in near complete darkness. In the cupboard Henry considered his wealth of dnL. He considered the comfort of the cupboard, and he considered that he should really learn to control himself (but wasn’t it made alright, he asked me, because of the expiration dates and the danger of the flavour changing afterwards? He better deplete them before that happens, right? I didn’t know what to tell him.)

Henry M. really enjoyed that sojourn into cupboardness. He talked about it at length with me, the only person he seemed to consider a friend. And apparently he did go back into the cupboard, and apparently when he wanted to get out again… he couldn’t. He had been able to fold himself into the cupboard, but seems to have found great difficulty in unfolding himself. This is where I come in. I received a text message:

A fair enough request, except that Henry lives in the United States whereas I live in England. We do now and we did then. This I considered a reasonable obstacle to helping Henry out, so I declined, implicitely, by never showing up.

This is his house in Vancouver, WA (not to be confused with Vancouver, BC in Canada):

He’s in the house with the basketball court out back. Might actually still be in the cupboard. Would that be possible? I never did hear of him again. Let me give Henry a call. Or actually, international rates are pretty steep.