My second (and even more ridiculous) novel, Carcrash Parker and the Haven of Larpers, is available for pre-order through my webstore, where you can get a signed copy and support me financially as an indie author, since when you buy directly from me, a bigger share of the sale goes to the author than if you buy on Amazon.
Today, though, I want to talk about how the novel came to be, why I’ve been working on this story in some form since 2008, and how a single story can take vastly different shapes
After College Ended, I Needed a Creative Project to Work On
Let’s rewind alllllllllll the way to summer 2007. I’d just finished college, and was living at home in New Hampshire, working a temporary internship with a lake protection group. I’d also just broken up with my girlfriend, a lot of my friends weren’t around anymore, my student loans were coming due, my trusty 1990 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme had to be scrapped due to a rusted-out brake line, and it felt like people were constantly asking me what I was going to do with my life. When fall rolled around, my internship went from full-time to part-time, and I started spending more time at home. It was a rough, lonely, and uncertain period in my life.
My childhood best friend Mike Rushia was in a similar boat, but in some ways worse—his parents had moved while we were in college, and he was still looking for a job. We started spending more time together, which chiefly involved watching the entire run of James Bond movies and DVD extras over the course of a few months.
Mike and I had also grown up playing PC adventure games—games like the Sierra King’s Quest series, the Quest for Glory series, the Laura Bow games, and even older typing adventure games like Hugo’s House of Horrors, where your character moves around a series of still screens and you have to gather items and solve puzzles. Some of those puzzles are easy, like finding a key to unlock a door, but some are less intuitive, like using an old piece of cheese to power a magic wand-enhancing machine for some reason in King’s Quest V. These games also had memorable characters and stories that unfolded through action and dialogue, creating more innovative experiences without relying on reflexes or large amounts of time spent leveling up.
One day (I can’t remember exactly when or where), Mike and I were talking, and he asked if I wanted to try making an adventure game of our own: he would do the programming if I could come up with a story and do the writing, and we could both figure out the art somehow. At that point, working on a creative project with a friend I’d grown up with sounded like exactly what I needed to find some sort of focus.
A still from King’s Quest VI (1992), an example of a classic ’90s adventure game. Note the portrait of Alexander, whose lips move in the voice version as he speaks to different characters, the Windows 3.1 top bar, and Alexander’s very Fred-from-Scooby-Doo scarf.
A Simple Story, and Lots of Puzzles
Over the next two years, the script I put together and polished for Carcrash Parker and the Haven of Larpers the adventure game stemmed from a simple concept: Carson “Carcrash” Parker, a wisecracking twentysomething slacker who doesn’t have a job and still lives with his parents, has his Commodore 64 computer stolen by a band of Live-Action Role-Players (LARPers, which I spelled out in lowercase) headed by his old high-school rival Miles, who also happens to have a high-paying engineering job and brags about how successful he is.
While much of the game revolved around Carson walking around the town of Bulfton, New Hampshire and the surrounding woods, picking up inventory items, making fun of larpers, and solving puzzles to get his Commodore 64 back, there was also a larger story element exploring why Carson didn’t have a job (frustrations with societal expectations, disillusionment with consumerism, no interesting jobs in rural New Hampshire, etc.). Over the course of the game, we also met his friend Nick, who was working at a hardware store to pay his student loans after not being able to find full-time work after college, and Ruby, who was more openly creative and focused in her desire to live a different kind of life. All three characters were contrasted with Miles, who openly equated full-time work and a high salary is with success, and who openly mocked anyone who hadn’t achieved those same successes.
It was by far the largest and most ambitious project I’d ever worked on, and the first time, I felt like I was integrating themes from real life into my writing in a way that felt clear and fun, rather than forced or contrived. It was also the first time I really tried adding movie, TV, and video game references into my writing (like I used to when I was in elementary school), which made the story feel more distinct. Having Mike and a few other friends to bounce ideas off of helped a lot, and also made the process of writing in isolation feel less lonely, when I was used to writing for a classful of other college students.
The script I came up with—while far from perfect, and kind of immature—had a lot of great jokes and moments in it, and taught me a LOT about working on a bigger project as a writer.
I also took the characters of Carson, Nick, and Ruby from a crappy attempt at a screenplay I’d written my sophomore year of college. That screenplay didn’t have any larpers in it, but the story was about struggling to find your way after high school, dealing with different kinds of jobs, and feeling frustrated about your life direction as a twentysomething. In a lot of ways, the Carcrash Parker and the Haven of Larpers adventure game represented a leveling up of that not very well-developed story I’d tried to write years before, and it offered a chance to improve on concepts that I was interested in, but hadn’t quite successfully put on the page yet.
Still image from the unfinished Carcrash Parker and the Haven of Larpers adventure game. Note Carson’s simple larping disguise consisting of a sword and helmet, and the 64-sided dice in his inventory.
But Why Larping?
Larping (or, rather, LARPing in all caps) was something I was interested in more as a concept than as an activity I wanted to do.
A lot of people have asked me if I’ve ever larped, and the answer is Yes and No—No in the sense that I’ve never put on a costume and joined an organized larping group that holds events or has a lot of rules, but Yes in the sense that I’ve done small murder mystery or pretend-type roleplaying games with various friend groups over the years, though we certainly never called this LARPing. No way—larping was something the nerdy kids in college did with foam-rubber swords and cheap costumes, or that somebody’s friend snuck off to do on weekends at expensive gatherings with other nerds.
This weird double-standard about whether or not larping was for nerds was a real downfall of the adventure game script, which included a LOT of jokes making fun of larping in a way that was sometimes mean-spirited—though sometimes not. In a way, everyone in Carcrash Parker and the Haven of Larpers the adventure game was the butt of the jokes: Carson himself, Miles, the larpers, all the side characters, and even the game’s narration. The result was something really silly that didn’t quite take its subject matter seriously enough—which, in retrospect, maybe didn’t quite work the way I wanted it to (but was VERY close!).
It wasn’t until years later that I really began to learn more about larping—what it is, how it works, its relationship with formal stage acting, and its relationship to the imaginary pretend games that Mike and I used to play in elementary school during recess. My first job in Japan teaching English to adults also involved a tremendous amount of live-action role-playing in the classroom, where the students and I had to pretend to be store clerks, strict bosses, lazy roommates, nervous coworkers, etc. and act out scenes with each other in English (though again, we didn’t call that larping either).
For a more detailed discussion of the different forms larping can take, from one-on-one relationship games to workplace training sessions, I highly recommend Leaving Mundania by Lizzie Stark, a fascinating, easy-to-read exploration of larping written by someone who’s also learning about it for the first time.
So Whatever Happened with the Adventure Game?
I worked on the adventure game script from 2008 to 2011 or so, which was when I got back from living in Japan and Mike and I sat down to work on the actual game. For the next year or so, we drew maps and sketches of each scene as our next step and slowly figured out how to create digital game art while Mike worked on the game engine. Since we were both in between jobs and at another crossroads point in our lives, we were both grateful to have a fun, creative project that helped us focus our energy.
As the years passed, though, while neither of us ever outright said that we were giving up on the project, the game just kind of faded into the background, especially as we faced bigger challenges with the digital art. Neither of us knew much about crowdfunding or online communities where we could have met other artists and game designers back then (and we certainly didn’t have the money to pay anyone), so without a strong team to work with, the project began to seem more intimidating than it had in the early stages.
A good portion of the Carcrash Parker game did eventually get designed, though—Mike did a pretty amazing job creating the player menu (at the top of the image), several background screens, and a few characters, with help from his wife Ashley. The results were too cool to keep buried on our hard drives, which is why we decided to offer them as part of a set of postcards you can get if you pre-order the novel by June 18th and choose the postcard bundle.
That’s all for now. I’m REALLY excited to share the finished novel with the world, and in Part 2, I’ll share how the adventure game concept became a novel, the challenges I faced, and what changed in creating the new story. Stay tuned!