Mystery House Always Wins

It is getting dark.

I am standing in the foyer of a large Victorian house. This is the Mystery House. Having let myself in through the front door I am now faced with seven people all standing in a row, neither moving nor talking, and each one looking at me with the same unblinking, lifeless eyes. And it is getting dark.

I try to leave through a nearby doorway. I DON'T UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU MEAN, protests the Mystery House, then adds, IT IS GETTING DARK. I clarify: type the words 'go door'. I look around in the next room. THERE IS NOTHING SPECIAL. IT IS GETTING DARK. I continue to explore the house in this fashion. The seven people have now vanished. IT IS GETTING DARK. In the kitchen, I find a book of matches. IT IS GETTING DARK. I leave the kitchen. I DON'T UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU MEAN. I go door. IT IS GETTING DARK. Upstairs, I enter a nursery and find one of the seven, on the floor, dead. IT IS GETTING DARK. IT IS DARK, YOU CAN'T SEE. I light a match, and look at the body. I DON'T KNOW HOW TO LOOK. I leave. THE MATCH WENT OUT. I light another match and keep looking around. THE MATCH WENT OUT. IT IS DARK, YOU CAN'T SEE. I light another match. I explore the west hallway. I CAN'T GO IN THAT DIRECTION. THE MATCH WENT OUT. IT IS DARK, YOU CAN'T SEE. I light another match. I head downstairs. I DON'T UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU MEAN. I go stairs. THE MATCH WENT OUT. IT IS DARK, YOU CAN'T SEE. I light another match. I head to the back yard, where I stumble upon a second body. THE MATCH WENT OUT. IT IS DARK, YOU CAN'T SEE. I light another match and attempt to examine the victim. I DON'T UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU MEAN. THE MATCH WENT OUT. IT IS DARK, YOU CAN'T SEE. I light another match and walk to another door into the house. THIS DOOR IS CLOSED. I open the door and go door. THE MATCH WENT OUT. IT IS DARK, YOU CAN'T SEE. I light another match. In this dining room there is a candle on the table. THE MATCH WENT OUT. IT IS DARK, YOU CAN'T SEE. I light another match and move to light the candle. YOU DON'T HAVE IT. I take the candle, then, and light it. OK. Breathing a little easier, I head back out into the yard. YOU TRIP OVER RUG AND FALL. OH, OH, YOU STARTED A FIRE WITH YOUR CANDLE! I look at the fire. THE FIRE IS OUT OF CONTROL. YOU ARE DEAD. WOULD YOU LIKE TO PLAY AGAIN

Nobody likes Mystery House.

The common knock on this (very) early adventure game from Sierra On-Line's Ken and Roberta Williams is that while it has a deserved place in video game history, it's plainly not a very enjoyable video game. It certainly was an innovation, though, being the first adventure to feature full, albeit primitive, computer graphics in addition to the usual text. And this is why Mystery House is remembered: for its historical significance, kind of like Birth of a Nation, or polio.

Mystery House is ostensibly a mystery story, one told through crude line art, constrained prose and a barely functional text parser. The premise is that of these seven - guests? residents? - one is killing off the others, and possibly the player too, in an effort to claim some 'jewels' rumoured to be hidden in the house.

This mystery is not, as Poirot would say, "all that." The killer dumps all of the bodies out in the open, for the player to not so much 'discover' as inevitably happen upon in the general course of being alive. And as to which of the seven is the culprit - a creative choice that is basically arbitrary - the murderer kills the other suspects within minutes of the game commencing, which takes a lot of the guesswork out of this case. The puzzles in this game, such as they are, have nothing to do with solving murders. The player is just present in the house while murders occur as a matter of routine.

So if this is a mystery game, it sounds pretty easy, right? Like Poirot would say, "as if!" Mystery House is unintuitive, frustrating and near impossible to complete unassisted - but not because of the mystery. This is a game about a house. The player's time is occupied not by the solving of murders but discovering secret passages and tunnels within the house or wrangling the text parser to do things like turn on the faucet in a kitchen sink ("WATER ON").

Navigation should be as simple as typing either "NORTH", "SOUTH", "EAST" or "WEST" where appropriate, but any doors, gates, stairways or holes all require unique commands that you must figure out as you go along, like constantly relearning how to walk or "GO HOLE". It isn't this easy, either. Often these compass points don't even correspond correctly to what's on the screen. Exiting a room through the west door may take you outside, into a forest, where you might think typing "EAST" would bring you back inside, but actually the right command would be "UP". Go east and you delve further into the forest, which appears to be infinite in all directions and every screen of it literally identical.

The game is remarkably unhelpful about all of this, actually. If you're on a stairway and want to go UP STAIRS, Mystery House responds, I DON'T UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU MEAN. Then adds, as though you are confused: YOU ARE ON A STAIRWAY.

The true challenge of Mystery House arises from handicapping the player's ability to function within a world. The art is often incomprehensible: you don't know what you're meant to be looking at. The text parser dismisses direct requests out of hand as clearly nonsensical. The rules change on a whim: from one screen to another, up literally becomes down. Interaction is necessary but often punished: lighting a stove, for instance, will cause it to immediately explode and kill the player. Ultimately, through technical and design ineptitude, the basic act of survival is made a constant struggle.

And in that way, Mystery House is something more than the first graphic adventure: it's the first survival horror game.

Read literally, Mystery House is not a mystery story but a recurring nightmare, unbound from real world logic. You appear on the doorstep of an unfamiliar house with no idea why you should be there. The world is rendered in unclear black, green and purple murk. Seven strange people, all alike, stand motionless in the foyer, staring at you, but you cannot touch them or speak to them. Then they vanish, and you find them dead. There is no way to leave the house. Once you enter the front door, it locks behind you. You walk through a door in the kitchen and into an endless forest. Dying doesn't end the dream: it only sets you back outside that front door, to look at those creepy people again, to find that book of matches again, and light them and lose them one by one, staving off the darkness in interminable style. You cannot talk. It is difficult to move. This is the nightmare where you are in danger and cannot make your legs walk.

In this nightmare, all you can do is run through this empty chamber of a house forever, because you don't know how to leave it and perhaps cannot, fumbling around in the dark while you are told, repeatedly, that you are bad at things like moving.

Catharsis comes in Mystery House not when the mystery is solved but when you start attacking the house itself. Later in the game, you must pull furniture and masonry apart, let fires burn holes in the floor and smash down walls with a sledgehammer. You are not exploring the house at this point: you are violating it. And after all it's put you through, seeing this house destroyed is a welcome brutality.

When the end arrives, the killer is dead and you've found both the jewels and the key to the front door: the exit, at last, to this house. You open the door, you go door, and are informed via simple text that you've won the game. Then, it asks, would you like to play again?

I type "no", and press enter.

And then, no kidding, the game cuts to this:

You will never leave this house.

Nobody likes Mystery House. But this house always wins.

At War with the Vikings

There’s something to be said for running away from one’s problems. Specifically, the following text.

In times of personal crisis, the prospect of getting away from absolutely everything is highly attractive. I like to believe there’s something positive to be gained from packing up and absconding to some far away place, not permanently, but for what you’d call a lost weekend or similar expression of self-indulgence. At minimum, this is the act of clearing one’s head, but ideally it’d also bring some clarity of purpose or contentment. By escaping all the factors and circumstances that define a life and diving into total randomness, one might discover meaning, even wisdom, in the chaos.

My lost weekend was just a Thursday. Immediately following a break-up and a number of work opportunities all simultaneously and meaningfully cratering, I decided to get away from London for a while. The next day, before dawn, I boarded a train for the city of York, some 200 miles north.

All I really knew about York is that it was ruled by Vikings in the Middle Ages. During this period, the city we now know was called the Kingdom of Jorvik. As you’d expect, a big part of the city’s tourism is Viking stuff. Vikings! What could be better? The uncomplicated psyche and fundamental home truths of primal Viking life might be the perfect thing to cut through my specifically modern problems.

For tourists, one of York’s biggest draws is the Jorvik Viking Centre, which boasts a thorough and vivid recreation of a village straight out of Viking times. “Come face to face with a Viking,” it is promised. Visitors access this medieval village via time car, named of course for its time-travelling properties.

I head for the Jorvik Viking Centre in the late morning. It’s when I, as a lone adult male, get in line behind an entire classroom of French schoolchildren, that I start to think this might be weird.

Once the thirty children have all been processed, I buy a ticket in the lobby. “Just one?” asks the woman behind the counter. I confirm this is the case.

Before we arrive at the Viking village itself, there’s a room downstairs that serves as a waystation between the timelines. In this dimly lit chamber, there are a lot of placards and LCD displays detailing the history of the Viking presence in York. Under our feet, a glass floor reveals human bones and Viking trinkets, all discovered by an archaeological dig in the last century, strewn through the dirt. The French children and their chaperones meander around the room in small groups, cross-checking the information on the walls with worksheets of Viking-related homework.

There’s some Viking Centre staff down here too, all clothed in period Viking garb. I assume that this is the official staff uniform but perhaps it’s an amazing coincidence. In the stairwell, two Vikings flirt lightly. Another Viking wanders the floor. “Oh, feel free to ask me any questions,” he announces vaguely to his dispersed audience. Ask a Viking – what an opportunity! I note that nobody seems interested in taking him up on his offer. In fairness, the only questions I can think to ask him – “Do you ever feel like you’re just drifting?” “Have you ever been in love?” “Viking, are you ever lonely?” – would not be appropriate in this academic setting.

A few words about the time car. It’s less of a car, I can see now, than a big motorised seat attached to a ceiling track. Not exactly the DeLorean. The time car is parked in a corner, where it departs this waystation and enters a time tunnel. Admittance to the time car is governed by another Viking. I make my way over to him, accidentally cutting in line before two small French girls. (“Cut in front of me in the time car queue like one of your French girls,” it is often remarked.)

“Just you, sir?” asks the Viking – like a viking would ever call somebody sir.

“Yes.”

“Enter the time car.” He doesn’t say this.

To my disappointment, the time car will be ferrying me through the entirety of the village, rather than just dropping me off discreetly from a block or two away. It runs on a rail on a programmed course at a leisurely pace. My first Viking sighting on this tour through time is two Viking kids playing in the mud, and at first I’m shocked that this operation has roped in child actors. But as I draw closer I realise that they aren’t real people in Viking suits, but automatons.

From there, I proceed down a receiving line of animatronic Viking characters, each introduced in the very proper English tones of my time car audio guide. I meet Sigurd the antler worker, Unni the woodworker, a couple of fishermen, a blacksmith and some assholes arguing about what to have for dinner (Some things never change, notes my narrator wryly). As I ride past, they speak a sentence in Old Norse and jerk around a little bit, affecting the motions of their purported trades. This goes on for about ten minutes. The whole experience, I am told, is supposedly enhanced through the addition of realistic and unsanitary Viking odours, but actually the gift shop I visit afterwards smelled worse by a significant and nauseating margin.

Before the ride ends, there’s a hell of a denouement in store. We come to one last Viking, squatting in an open-air medieval toilet and straining audibly to take a dump. Unsuccessfully, I might add. Rounding him in the time car, I hear him groan and grunt and fart a little bit. Then the ride is over, and an elderly woman in the middle of her knitting helps me to disembark the time car. I leave the Viking Centre quickly.

That’s pretty much the whole story. Having left home despondent and in search of some kind of personal illumination or epiphany, what I get – sometimes, all you ever get – is a robot Viking taking a shit. And I never quite stop thinking about this toilet-bound Viking, this poor guy. Consider what defines his existence. He was built to try and do one thing – one very particular, disgusting thing – yet no matter how hard he tries, he is, by cruel design, incapable of ever achieving that goal. His life is Lucy Van Pelt pulling the football away from Charlie Brown. He is trapped forever on the cusp of almost there. So he squats in the corner, in an Ouroboros prison of unfulfillment, a textbook failure for generations of children to laugh about when they pass by, and whenever they might think of him.

Adventures in Freelancing

In December of last year, before Christmas, I quit my job, left my home town of Wellington, New Zealand and moved to London. My plan was to begin a new, full-time career in freelance writing. This seemed like an obvious match: in the late 2000s, writing was pretty much the only thing I did. Although fully aware that I'd never written in a commercial or professional environment, I still went for it. I moved to a new country with no source of income, armed with only one thing: a writing portfolio filled with short stories about video games, fake pinball trivia and ironic H.P. Lovecraft homages. This is what is known in sarcastic circles as an excellent idea. Or, in medical terms, a classic case of Fyfe Syndrome.

A brief aside: most people were encouraging or excited when I said I was going to do this. But when I was boarding the plane to London and waving goodbye to my family, someone grabbed my arm. It was an old woman, no more than five feet, who told me in a hoarse, urgent voice that I was going to be eaten alive - not by the big city, but by a wolf. I told her to get lost and she disappeared into the crowd.

In all seriousness, five months have now gone by and I can report that my experience of breaking into freelance writing has been what you'd diplomatically refer to as "educational", "challenging, but in, like, a good way, you know?" or just simply as "an experience." Despite proving myself something less than successful at the job, I have, as you'd hope, learned a lot about what it means to be a freelance writer. Knowing how valuable such advice is from someone who's been trying something new for five months, please find four important lessons about freelance writing below.

FOUR BASIC THINGS TO KNOW ABOUT BEING A FREELANCE WRITER

#1. BEING ABLE TO SELL YOURSELF IS NOT THE SAME AS BEING ABLE TO WRITE WELL

In many ways it doesn't matter how good of a writer you are. Even if you are demonstrably great, generally people do not simply come to you with work. If you want something, you have to ask for it. Eloquence might make the job of pitching easier, but fundamentally writing is a different skill than being able to market and promote your services.

Not only do you need to be good at selling your ideas, but you need to be doing it all the time. Pitches, even those from great, commercially successful writers, are rejected constantly for reasons both fair and unfair. Don't rely on just one good idea: have dozens. Have infinite ideas. Breed an infinite number of idea-babies and send them to their death.

#2. BE OKAY WITH BEING ALONE

Writing is not a 9 to 5 job, it is a 24/7 job. Writing is as much about thinking and being alive as it is typing words. And because creativity seems to rely in large part on the right neurons firing in your brain, you feel inspired and write well at weird times, and feel like shit and write as shittily as a shit in a shit at other weird times. To be productive, you'll have to make sacrifices: telling your friends that you're too busy to talk or hang out, not being fully present at a party or dinner or date, and admitting that what you really want in that moment is some paper and a pencil and some alone time. Romantically speaking, such a sacrifice is a noble one, made as it is for the sake of creative expression.

When things are going well, you're lonely because you want to be. Not so in the Bad Times, during which you cannot write well, cannot sell well, have no ideas, no contact with editors, leaving you with just a blank document and a keyboard, and every key you press only manages to make an ugly thing uglier.

This is when you're desperate to be around other people, whether for inspiration or companionship or distraction or whatever. But your friends probably don't schedule their availability around your creative mood swings, and so when you do decide to have a social life, sometimes you can't. It is in the Bad Times, when you are a writer who cannot write, that you will feel the loneliest.

#3. HAVE SOMETHING THAT IS JUST YOURS

Have a creative outlet that belongs exclusively to you, which is a conduit for all your weirdness that is not commercially viable. This is especially important if your sensibility is naturally inclined towards the strange, the personal or otherwise inaccessible. Very likely, there won't be any money in doing so: it'll be a blog or a Twitter account. You might say that this is wasting your time and energy on a thing that pays you zero dollars, which is fully true.

The benefits, though, are not financial. As a freelance writer, the things that you say are delayed for weeks or months at a time and subject to an edit process you're not privy to. I really believe it's healthy to have some outlet through which you can say exactly what you want to say and at any time. Otherwise, you are writing for a living without ever being able to express what you honestly want to express.

#4. BE PREPARED

This advice is best illustrated with a real life example. Earlier this year, I pitched a feature idea to a London-based magazine that should go unnamed. The pitch was rejected, but luck turned out to be on my side and very much not on some other people's side: the magazine's editor contacted me to say that another writer had initiated an article for the publication, but had been called away on account of a sudden family emergency. In his absence, I was asked to complete the article, either because the editor took pity me or because, as he'd originally said, he genuinely liked my writing.

The assignment was a feature profile of a "creative collective" which had offices in London's uber-hip Shoreditch. This collective, which consisted of notable London artists, filmmakers and graphic designers, had technically been a going concern for a year but had flown under the radar until now. I organised an interview with some of the key personnel as soon as was convenient, which turned out to be a Tuesday night.

I arrived at their offices around eight p.m., and was greeted by one of the collective's co-founders, Katy. (Not her real name.) What I didn't know at the time was that over the last year, many of her co-founding members had dropped out, without publicly stating the reason why. Had I known that in advance, I'd have been able to approach the subject with some diplomacy. Instead, one of my first questions to Katy was about a co-founder named Shaun (not his real name either), a well-known theatre and film producer in London. Katy informed me tersely that Shaun was no longer part of the collective. I stumbled a bit and offered up a question about the collective's philosophy that even I knew at the time wasn't very good. "Well," said Katy with disdain, "you're confusing two very important concepts there." I nodded and listened to her lecture while she looked disappointed with me.

A little later, Katy gave me a tour around the collective's creative space. I half-heartedly examined the workspace, idly playing around with objects on the tables and so forth, and peeked inside a shut closet. As I opened the door, I heard Katy scream "No!" A giant black wolf burst out from behind the door and I was thrown to the ground. The wolf looked me over and issued a howl. "No," Katy pleaded, "don't hurt him, Shaun, don't hurt him." Immediately, I got to my feet and booked it towards the stairwell. The offices were on the sixth floor of the building, and I'd made it down to the fifth before the wolf somehow pounced onto the landing before me, turned, and growled. I threw my laptop bag at the wolf and sprinted back up the stairs.

It's a cliche, but the best way to kill a werewolf is indeed the fabled silver bullet: it's the fastest way to introduce silver into the bloodstream. I hadn't even considered this eventuality at the time, though, and had no silver with me. If I'd been better prepared, I would have: I would have noticed that it was a full moon the night of my interview and taken precautions. But I was sloppy, I didn't prepare, and that's how I found myself being chased up a stairwell by a werewolf.

I felt the wolf's hot breath on my back all the way up the stairs. I made it to the roof and tried to shut the stairwell door behind me, but the wolf jutted out its paw and stopped me. I struggled for a moment but he flung the door back and me with it. I quickly picked myself up and ran to the edge of the roof, hoping, but without any sure reason to hope, that I was heading towards a fire escape. As I neared the ledge, the werewolf circled around and stopped me in my tracks. I froze, and in that moment the werewolf pounced and pushed me to the floor. I tried to hold back the beast's salivating jaw, knowing that if he got me between its teeth it didn't matter what happened next. The wolf raised its right claw and slashed me across the face. I lost my grip and fell back hard. The werewolf strutted atop me, eyeing me carefully, and then raised itself on its hind legs in the light of the full moon and howled. In that moment I saw my opportunity. I pulled back my right leg and kicked the creature square in its stomach. The wolf stumbled and tipped over the edge of the roof. Its howl, moments earlier the bragging of a vicious predator, turned immediately to terror, and then, with a dull thump as the body hit the pavement, to silence.

I made my way down to the street. Shaun lay on the street in his human form, with a crowd gathering around his naked and bloodied body. "Let me through," I said. I knelt down beside Shaun and, weakly, he reached out to me. I took his hand in both of mine.

"I didn't mean to hurt anyone," Shaun whispered to me.

"I know," I told him. "I know."

"I'm sorry," he said, and his head rolled back until his cheek braced the asphalt.

"It's okay," I said. "Let go. You can let go."

Shaun nodded, almost imperceptibly, and expired on the sidewalk. Once I knew he was really gone, I released his hands. I took a bus home.