Postmortem: Where the Water Tastes Like Wine

(or, “should have been two dogs”)

Where the Water Tastes Like Wine is a bleak American folk tale of a narrative game about wandering the country and trading stories. If you’ve heard about the project, you know that one of the features that sets it apart is the sheer number of writers who lent their diverse talents and voices to compose a game about America that speaks of and to many threads and cultures and backgrounds. There were 24 writers in all, and I was lucky enough to be one of them. Several people have already written excellent pieces on what writing for this game was like; Laura’s excellent postmortem especially covers the overall process of making the game. I didn’t write any of the major 16 characters you speak to, and I only wrote a proportionately small handful of stories, so this is only about my process in my own small corner. And no, I can’t tell you how we got Sting.

On Lacuna: in elaboration of a (sort-of)manifesto

I wasn’t sure initially if I would submit to Manifesto Jam: I liked the idea, but I am not much of a manifesto writer. My work tends to be crowded with hedges and footnotes, reflective choices and spaces that aren’t always resolved. But that, in the end, is why I wrote what I did: I wanted to imagine a manifesto that was not didactic, that did not draw hard lines (between what is and isn’t a ‘lacunic interactive’; what is and isn’t an ‘interactive’ at all) and most of all could speak to much of my work without having to confine all of my work–both current and present. Hence, On Lacuna came to be. I want to elaborate here on some of my reasoning behind the points I chose to include, and how they’re reflected in interactives I make or enjoy.