Astrologaster with Katharine Neil
Astrologaster (Nyamyam)
He had sex on the grave of the widow of a man he hated... He had wet dreams about the queen…
MUSIC
Welcome to Talking Simulator, a series of short conversations about video games with interesting people who play them. I’m Jordan Erica Webber, and in this episode I discuss the excellent comedy astrology game Astrologaster with my guest Katharine Neil.
I’m Katharine, and I’m the narrative designer/writer for Astrologaster, and I do other things as well but that’s what we’re talking about so that’s how I shall present myself.
Astrologaster was made by a team of people at independent developer Nyamyam, and was designed and directed by Jennifer Schneidereit, but I wanted to talk to Katharine about the writing, to find out how she managed to squeeze history, astrology, and comedy into a game.
Content warning: this episode contains mention of miscarriage. We avoid major spoilers for Astrologaster, but if you wanted to go into the game without any idea of how it plays, who the characters are, or what events took place during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, then you might want to go and play it before you listen to this conversation.
MUSIC
So, I think-, I’ve got, like, a few questions. Hmm, I’ve got, like, 20 questions.
Do they involve, like, mineral, vegetable, animal style? Because that’s-, actually maybe you could interview someone about their game using a 20 questions format.
So, like, to learn about a new game that’s just been announced? So just be like, ‘Is it a role-playing game? Yes or no?’
Yeah, yeah, yeah, and then see if you could guess exactly what-, does it have zombies? Is it multiplayer?
I feel like that would be relatively easy in the current games industry where everything is the same.
That’s how you could conclude the interview. You could say, ‘Well, this just proves the-, this is a shocking indictment on the state of the industry.’ Especially if you manage to just interview three different people and you manage to deduce the game within five questions or something.
So this is the new review scores, is how many questions from 20 questions it takes to guess what your game is. That makes it more interesting. Like, Astrologaster, for instance, you probably would not be able to guess in 20 questions.
Yeah. Well, I hope so. I mean, people have been making jokes in the comment section on the Guardian review, a couple of people made gags about there being so many comedy astrology 16th century games that it’s just too hard to keep up with them all. That joke had already been made, but it hadn’t been made in the Guardian comments section, so that was cool.
That’s a badge of honour.
MUSIC
If you had to describe the game in one sentence, how would you describe it?
It’s an astrological comedy game in which you play a 16th century astrologer who was a real historical figure, and you guide him to help his clients with their professional, medical, emotional, and financial problems. And political problems, and romantic problems. Any problem.
For anyone who hasn’t played, how do you actually go about solving your clients’ problems?
Well, the short answer is you do astrology, and it’s real astrology, with an asterisk. So it’s a simplified experience. We used real star charts from the dates and times of the consultations that we present you with. So you look at the stars in the night sky like an astrologer does, the night sky is divided up into twelve houses etc., and you choose a combination of parts of the sky, the houses, to inform the answer that you give your client.
So, for example, in one part of the sky there might be Venus in the house of finances or something, and there might be the house of business, there might be-, actually, that’s a bit close to the house of finances, isn’t it? But there are many houses. There are twelve of them. And then you choose a combination of them, and that combination forms the answer that Simon Forman, the astrologer, will give to his clients.
You’re telling Simon Forman what to say, but you don’t know exactly what he’s going to say to his clients, because it’s sort of mediated, sorry to use that word. But Guardian readers would like that word, wouldn’t they? In the comments section they’d get into that word. But what I mean is, you indirectly guide the answers. So you might not know what House 1 plus House 3 plus House 7 is really going to turn out to be in combination, but that’s-, you indirectly guide him, by choosing parts of the night sky, essentially, from an astrological chart that’s a real chart, which made it really hard for me as the narrative designer.
Because I had to come up with, like-, you know, there’s a foreigner in the house of families and stuff. What does that mean? Your husband is having it off with a foreign person? I don’t know.
Oh, interesting. So your writing of the narrative was constrained by astrology, so what things you are able to say with astrology. Did that make it a challenge? Or did that almost help to narrow down what you were going to say?
It was a challenge, but yeah, as you indicated, it was kind of like a creative aid in a way. And when you think about it, you know, throughout art history-, I mean art as in, you know, music, art, literature-, creatives have been using random numbers, for example, to come up with ideas. Like, Mozart had this dice game that he used, for example. The surrealists used games and, you know, elements of randomness, sort of playful ways of coming up with their ideas. There’s a lot of evidence, I guess, of creativity coming from just rolling the dice.
I’m not saying that astrology is rolling the dice, but it’s a system, you know? It’s, like, a system with, some may say, random elements in there. So it forces you to think. And I think tarot cards, a similar thing. And maybe there’s an idea in your subconscious that is a good idea, but picking a card or seeing a planet in a certain house lets that idea out. It’s like a prompt.
That’s so interesting. Given, like you say, astrology is a system, why do you think we don’t have millions of astrology games already? And where did the idea come from, for you, to make one?
It actually didn’t come to me. It came to Jennifer Schneidereit, the game’s designer and director. She was at a seminar given by the Wellcome Trust, where they sort of did this sort of speed dating for scientists and game developers to share ideas and see if they want to work with each other. Well, it was really the scientists sharing ideas. And there, at this seminar, presenting research, was Dr Lauren Cassell. She’s at the University of Cambridge. And she is-, have you seen A Discovery of Witches, the TV show?
I haven’t, I’m afraid.
Well, there’s this really popular series of historical romance books. The first one is called A Discovery of Witches, and I can’t remember the titles of the other ones, but it’s, like, super popular. And they’ve recently made a TV show based on that first book, a TV series, called A Discovery of Witches. And the main character is this young American researcher who spends a lot of time at the Bodleian Library at Oxford going through the Ashmole manuscripts, which is a collection in the basement of the library of, like, occult and witchcraft and weird stuff, basically.
This guy called Ashmole spent a big chunk of his life collecting occult weird kind of mysterious manuscripts dating back hundreds of years, and then he donated it to the Oxford library, and researchers have spent years kind of just going through this stuff. And the main character of this book, that’s what she does, and she discovers some mystical occult text that’s important to witches, or important to demons, I don’t know.
But she’s a very glamorous American young academic, right? And she makes this amazing discovery in the Bodleian Library, in the Ashmole manuscripts. And then a really hot vampires comes and seduces her, and he’s played by Matthew Goode in the TV series, so he’s really hot.
I can’t believe I haven’t seen this. I love hot vampires.
He’s sort of posh hot. The poshness slightly puts me off. But he is Matthew Goode, and he is hot. And so basically our origin story for the game is very, very, very similar, because Dr Lauren Cassell is American, she is blonde like the woman who stars in A Discovery of Witches, she did go to Oxford University 25 years ago to look through the Ashmole manuscripts, and she made this most amazing discovery.
And the discovery was that these kind of chicken scratchings and weird little symbols and stuff that had been lying in this collection in the basement of the library for 400 years were astrological charts. 30,000 of them, I think. Or 60,000. I don’t know, she keeps on-, I don’t know, she’s digitising them.
But she realised that these were Dr Simon Forman’s case notes for his patients, written in slightly bad Latin and stuff, but these kind of criss-crossy charts of astrological star charts and interpretations that no one knew what they were for until this young American, just like the star of A Discovery of Witches-, but you know what the difference is, between Dr Lauren Cassell and the main character of A Discovery of Witches?
Is it that there’s no hot vampire?
Exactly! So what happens at the beginning of A Discovery of Witches is that, you know, this young doctor, I mean this doctor of philosophy, researcher, she’s looking through the Ashmole manuscripts in the library. It’s all very spooky and exciting and everything, and she’s like, ‘Ooh, I’m going to publish lots of papers on this. It’s going to make my research career,’ whatever. And then Matthew Goode, the hot vampire, comes waltzing in, and then does eyes at her, and then basically that’s the end of her research career. I mean, it’s the beginning of a romantic drama, right, involving witches and demons and, you know.
But Dr Lauren Cassell took a different path 25 years ago, because she was not seduced by a hot vampire. Instead, she had a proper research career. She did not need a man/vampire to lead her astray and off into some other life. She spent 25 years going through these manuscripts, you know, the case books, and finding out about 16th century medicine. Because they’re the oldest medical records we have. They just happen to be astrology charts. But they’re also incredibly important.
Amazing.
And so she met Jennifer at this seminar thing, and she got up and said stuff like, ‘Simon Forman, super important, medical history, bla bla bla, he had sex on the grave of the widow of a man he hated… he had wet dreams about the queen…’
[Laughter]
And Jennifer thought, ‘Wow, that’s hilarious.’ We can make a game about this.
Amazing.
MUSIC
When it came time to do research for the game, because obviously it is based on true events and real people, what was the process like? How on earth did you tackle that?
Well, I mean, there was the original kind of stuff, the initial kind of work with Jennifer and Lauren. You know, they met up and talked about this kind of stuff, and Jennifer came up with the sort of shape of the game. But I came on a bit later, and then personally I read books. There are biographies out there about him.
There’s also the casebooks project, Lauren Cassell’s project, online, where they’ve digitised a lot of cases. So you can, like, look up cases and the topics of cases, and see the connections between the different clients. And they often had-, just like in the game, they often had, sort of, first or second degree of separation relationships. I mean, he had husbands and wives coming to him, and he had, you know, friends of friends, and that sort of thing.
But the research involved a lot of reading. I also had to research the period a lot, because the period during which he’s practising was a really interesting periods, the 1590s and then the early 1600s. Queen Elizabeth, you know, she died during that period. There were, you know, plagues happening. The Spanish Armada. The Gunpowder Plot, you know? 5th of November, remember, remember. So, lots of political machinations going on.
So yeah, I needed to-, because that stuff is in the game, and all the dates are correct, just so that there’s no Reddit subreddit on how we got all the facts-, I hope there will be a subreddit, like, with nerdy obsessed people who want to prove how our history is completely wrong. I would love that.
There are always men on the internet willing to tell you that you got a date wrong.
Yeah, I wasn’t going to say men, but I’m glad you said it.
[Laughter]
I want to be mansplained about the-, because that would mean people care. That’s another constraint. That was another-, I won’t say annoying, but difficult, challenging constraint, was, like, you’ve got to work with the stars of that particular date and time, but also the constraints of history.
Like, so if we’re going to have a case about the Gunpowder Plot, which we do, we do have that stuff in there, or the death of Queen Elizabeth, or that kind of-, or the Spanish Armada, you know, we had to have dates and times for the consultations that match the history, and what planets are they going to give us at that time, got to deal with the planets. You know what I mean? It’s, like, a lot of tradeoffs.
Wait, so the astrology is accurate as well? The right planets are in the sky at the right times.
Oh yeah, that’s why it was difficult. I mean, tough shit if there’s such and such a planet in such and such a house at such and such a time. I had to interpret that correctly. So, you know, Mars is a young man or a male child or aggression or something, and, you know, if it’s in the house of travel or something-, and Jennifer, she’d be, like, on my back, kind of like, ‘You’ve got to be stricter about that. That doesn’t really mean-,’ so she kept me honest!
I think it would have been far easier, but a different result, if we’d just made this shit up.
That’s an incredible achievement, though, to base it on accurate astrological readings.
And it was tough, because Jennifer had to find this data from the 16th century, and then she made a tool, like a software tool, for me to use to find these charts on the particular days and times. So it’s like, ‘Okay, well the Spanish Armada came in this week in this year, and I want this client to, you know, ask a question about such and such, and I want these kinds of answers, but can I find these-, ooh, maybe that’s a weird answer, I’ll put-,’ like, it took, like, a day to do each chart for me, to work out the chart.
And when you come to give your patients answers in the game, so often there are multiple answers that you can get Simon to choose from, is there such a thing as a wrong answer and a right answer? Or is it more based on what the patient wants to hear, or what reflects what’s actually happening?
It’s a combination. So, the patient might want to hear something initially, but most patients, you know, they want to hear the truth. So you often kind of find that you might have to tell them bad news, and they-, depending on the character of the patient they might be a bit grumpy about that, or in denial, at first. But then later they might give you a big boost and thank you, because what you said turned out to be correct.
And mostly the strategy-, well, sometimes it’s a matter of listening to what the patient says, like a good doctor, and picking up, sort of, clues, or even the blindingly obvious in what they say about what their condition is, or what their problem is. And then sometimes they don’t reveal everything. Sometimes there are some symptoms that they might have, or some things that are clearly relevant to the problem that they’re not saying, but it’s sort of obvious in their body language or something. And the charts, sometimes that’s-, you know, you can use the information from what they’ve just told you to make a sensible choice in the chart.
But actually probably the more important strategic stuff is what you hear from other clients, the gossip and the hints you get from other clients, that you can use for your clients. So some of these clients, they sort of know each other, and they might even be married. Like, medical ethics weren’t so good in those days.
[Laughter]
Yeah, so confidentiality wasn’t really-, he wasn’t very confidential. And you can see this in his case books. Like, for example-, and this case isn’t in the game, so it’s not a spoiler-, but for example, one of his clients was Shakespeare’s landlady, and Shakespeare’s landlady had a best friend who ran a wig shop, sold wigs. And I think either he’s got both of them as clients, or he’s got one of them and the other person’s husband, but they’re best friends, anyway.
And so one of them comes to him and says, ‘I’ve had a proposal from my best friend to go into business with her and have a big wig shop, turn our wig business into this big business. Should I do this? Is this a good idea?’ And Simon, in the casebooks you see that Simon says, ‘No, not such a good idea.’ Did he say that because of the stars? Or did he say that because his other client, the best friend or the husband, told him in confidentiality that she is shagging her best friend’s husband?
So basically there are two best friends, and one of them is shagging the husband of the best friend, but they don’t know. And so he knows that she potentially can’t 100% trust her best friend, and so she shouldn’t go into business with her. And so we’ve kind of put that aspect into the game, where yeah, I mean, you know information, and it’s not magic, and it’s not from the stars, but it’s because you’re privy to it.
Also, I mean, you can get characters killed. Just a couple.
I didn’t know that!
Yeah, there’s one character that make certain choices, you can get him killed. He’s a particularly annoying character.
Is he the one who keeps falling in love with different ladies?
Yes.
[Laughter] Okay.
MUSIC
One of the best things about Astrologaster is finding out the repercussions of your advice. Does that make it quite a difficult game, for instance, to exhibit? What was that process like? Because I saw it at a couple of events, and I remember liking the mechanic but not really understanding what the point of the game was until I actually had the full game in front of me when it was finished. So did you ever have problems with that, along the way?
Yeah, I think we needed to sort of-, people asked that question a lot. I mean, one thing we did have in the demo version of the game was both Alice Blague and her husband Thomas Blague. They were real clients of Forman as well. And we showed a little bit that you could use information from Thomas Blague to help Alice Blague, as a little taste of that.
But yeah, it’s kind of hard. Because relationships between people are not very clear cut, not as clear cut as killing someone or not killing someone. Yeah, and in real life people aren’t necessarily going to take your advice, or sometimes they will, or sometimes they will just do what they want to do anyway.
So to get that messy human stuff in there, I think it’s a bit of a tradeoff between that and gameplay at times, because-, I guess it’s like economics, you know? Human beings don’t always act in their own self interest, and they’re not predictable, and they’re not always rational, and you can’t control their behaviour like a perfect system.
Right, like it feels like video game players are constantly clamouring for better choices and consequences in their games, but maybe what you’ve done here is so much more realistic than the kinds of things we’re used to seeing in games that people almost don’t realise the system. Because you can’t really obviously tell what’s happening, you know, ‘I kill that person so they’re dead,’ because it’s less obvious to the player, they maybe don’t feel as satisfied at first, until they’ve spent more time with it.
Yeah, the predictability. ‘I will do x and I will get rewarded by the consequences for x every time I do x,’ is not-, yeah, we don’t have that. I suppose it’s like that contract with the player. You know, in game design you’re often told to be really fair to the player and not betray the player’s trust, which I think is a good principle but then, like, in real life relationships aren’t so transactional. It’s like, ‘I was really nice to this girl, and I let her cry on my shoulder, and I listened to all her problems, and I made her cookies and stuff, but she won’t sleep with me. It’s not fair.’
So your game friendzones people.
Maybe a little bit!
Yeah, and we do hae, like, a friendzoning kind of narrative thing going on.
Right, because your Dr Forman really likes to sleep with his patients. Is that historically accurate?
Oh my God. I really actually toned down the character. Like, I’ve been told in the past, and it’s probably true, that I tend towards nasty unsympathetic characters. For the minority of people, they really get off on that. For most people, it’s, like, a little bit too dark. And so for this game I thought, ‘You know, I’m going to be more positive, and I’m going to, you know, work a bit harder to make the character sympathetic.’ I mean, it’s still kind of dark.
But oh my God, if I had been absolutely 100% true to Simon Forman, the man, the real man? Short answer to the question: he shagged so many of his patients. And I don’t think he was, like, a sexual predator. I mean, there’s no evidence to suggest, as far as I know, that he indulged in sexual assault or anything, but he certainly tried it on, and he got it as well.
I mean, he must have-, he was not an attractive man. He was very ugly. We had to really work on making him uglier. I think in games there’s a real tendency to make characters, like, a bit too nice looking. But we had to really work with our art director. He’s actually uglier in real life, in many ways, I think. In his character and the way he looks and stuff. But he must have been really charming, because oh boy did he sleep with a lot of women. And they slept with him, they were happy to.
Or I suppose if he had a lot of patients coming to him, ‘I’m having problems with my sex life,’ then he offered himself as a solution. I guess there’s a kind of vulnerability there.
Well, yeah. The only man in your life who’ll listen to you is this guy. Yeah, it must have been really seductive. I think his talent was-, you know, because he didn’t have any of the advantages that, like-, ‘real doctors’, you know, they were often from quite wealthy backgrounds that allowed them to go to Oxford or Cambridge to get their medical degree. But he was completely self taught. He was a real underdog. And he read a lot of books. He was very very intelligent. But he had a real connection with common people, normal people, that I think these other doctors didn’t.
I don’t know if you’ve got up to this bit yet, but we have, like, a client who says, ‘Well, people call you a quack, so I wasn’t sure if I was going to come and see you, but I’ve had it up to here with these other doctors, because they tell women what to do, and they’re dismissive and they’re patronising, and I’m sick of it and I want to try something new. I want a doctor who listens to me.’
And we’ve got a lot of overt political stuff in there, I guess, but some of the stuff in there that’s not so obvious is the experiences of female friends, and myself, but mainly female friends and women I’ve met, and women I’ve talked to about their experiences with doctors and hospitals, and the way women can have their pain and their issues minimised. For example, I had this three-kilo abdominal tumour in me for, like, a few years. It was, like, the size of a rugby ball. And when women have abdominal pain it’s like, ‘Oh, well you’re a woman. You have abdominal pain.’
[Laughter]
I mean, whether that was true or not, that’s how I felt. And I was misdiagnosed for years. Maybe it’s not necessarily a gender thing, but there is such a thing as a gender pain gap. It is proven that women get taken less seriously, and they have their complaints dismissed more easily.
So I put that into the game. Like, he doesn’t necessarily behave well all the time, Dr Forman, but yeah, there are things about the medical experience, little things, that I tried to put in there. Not tried, really. I mean, this just comes out. It’s like, I’m a human being who happens to be a woman, like, this is what it’s like to be with a doctor. I just put it there, you know?
Yeah.
MUSIC
You also have quite a few, kind of, knowing jokes in there about being a woman, so thinks like the woman who wants to write poetry and how ridiculous that is, the idea that a woman could write poetry. How important do you think it is that people who play the game know that it was written by a woman, in order for them to accept that humour and to know that it’s satire?
Oh, actually that’s a really good-, because I got in trouble on a game where the player character, it was written in the first person, was a woman, I mean not, ‘Hi, I’m a woman,’ but, you know, I wrote it as a woman, and the character was a woman. But, you know, what seems to happen is that people, if you don’t gender something they assume it’s, you know, a man.
And my female protagonist was kind of bitchy, towards everyone, like, a misanthrope, but also towards women in that way that women can be bitchy about other women, because that’s real life, right? But yeah, some people took it as, like, ‘This character is saying really sexist things about-,’ but it was clear that they thought that it was a male character.
So yeah, that’s a really good question, because it’s like, a lot of this stuff is obviously-, well, I think it’s obviously ironic and sarcastic. But maybe that’s not-, yeah, maybe I allow myself to allow myself to delve into all these gender politics because I am a woman, and it’s like I can say what the hell I like. I feel like I can say what the hell I like. Whereas, like, if a man-, I don’t know, maybe a man wouldn’t feel so comfortable-, yeah. I don’t know. What do you think?
Yeah, no, I think especially in the current climate where people are very, kind of, cautious, or a lot of people are very cautious, I think people might be quick to not read the whole situation properly and maybe jump to, ‘Ooh, there’s a sexist joke in this game,’ and just assume that a man wrote it.
Yeah, I worry about-, because I’ve sort of moved gradually in my career over to the writing side bit by bit. I started out as a programmer in games, and sound designer, many years ago. And yeah, the closer you get to-, then I moved into game design, and now I write. You know, it’s getting scarier, because it’s like what I’m doing is more putting myself out there, and also at the scary edge of, like, potentially pissing people off, edge of things.
Because in real-, people are arseholes in real life. I’ve put in lines from ex boyfriends in this game. I mean, behind closed doors-, I mean, people can be nice people, they can be perfectly nice human beings, but in relationships people are bastards. And I include myself.
I mean, I think just because a character is an arsehole doesn’t mean the writer endorses what that character says, or the player needs to endorse what the character says, or-, and I know humour is a bit-, because it’s like, ‘What are we laughing at?’ The intention, and I hope this is clear but it might not be for some people, and I suppose you can’t please 100% of people, but the intention is so satirise the sexists and the sexism.
MUSIC
One of the things that I found quite surprising, although maybe I shouldn’t have, was that quite early on in the game one of the characters mentions, although not in so many words, having had miscarriages. And I don’t think I’ve ever seen that in a game before, I don’t know about you. But was it difficult to make that decision, or was that just something you thought, ‘No, I’ve definitely got to include this,’?
I forget how in games-, games is really held to different standards than TV and film. Like, I think if it were a film or TV, the things that are taboo or sensitive or tricky might be seen in a different light, in games versus TV and film. I mean, the miscarriage stuff was in there kind of for two reasons.
Firstly, because Avis Allen, she’s a real person, and she was one of his clients but was basically the love of his life, and she did-, she had so many miscarriages. I mean, it was a real tragedy for her. And that was a really defining part of her character. She had seventeen or something? I mean, it was-, I can’t remember.
But also because childbirth and problems with childbirth was a big theme in medicine at the time, and Dr Lauren Cassell, the researcher who didn’t get off with a vampire, she was like, ‘You know, got to have all these women’s issues in there.’ We probably put less women’s issues in there than there were actually in his casebooks, you know, proportionately we probably could have put more in, but, you know, childbirth, problems around childbirth, trying to have a child etc., losing children, was a massive theme in medicine.
MUSIC
Where did the idea come from to have songs to introduce the characters?
I think it was, like, a group decision, but my agenda obviously as the narrative designer is to use the whole cow. My agenda is to push narrative, narrative, narrative, narrative. That’s my unashamed, you know, bias. Like, got to squeeze some narrative out of everything, is my point of view. I don’t care if it’s good for the project or not, it’s going to be good for the-, story, story, story.
Plus, you know, Andrea and I, I mean we hadn’t met before the project, Jennifer had met Andrea through BAFTA, actually. And it turned out that Andrea and I share a love of early music. I actually did my degree in music performance and composition, and I used to be an early music singer. Shopping malls, weddings, that kind of thing.
Amazing! I didn’t know that.
It didn’t go very far, but yeah, I’m a bit of a music snob, as long as it’s before the 1800s. So madrigals, you know, English, Elizabethan madrigals. It was a golden age for the madrigal in England at that time in the late 16th century, so it made sense from that point of view, because life was kind of expressed, at that time, through pop songs, and the pop song of the time was a madrigal.
And yeah, so we just, like, really went for it, and me and Andrea, like I did the lyrics obviously, but we sort of really, you know, worked together on bringing the characters alive, and really got into expressing the characters. And yeah, we put in some contemporary themes in there as well, like failing up, and a bit of bitterness in there, a bit of class warfare in there.
[Laughter] And a great way to throw in a load of euphemisms, as well.
You mean like sexual euphemisms?
Yeah, the fa la la la la la stuff.
Oh yes, and that’s-, so, a really famous madrigal of the time, Thomas Morley:
Now is the month of maying,
When merry lads are playing,
Fa la la la la la la la la,
Fa la la la la la la lah.
Each with his bonny lass
Upon the greeny grass.
Fa la la la la la la la la, etc...
Oh, there’s this one which actually uses onomatopoeia to simulate humping.
[Laughter]
Like, ‘Up and down, up and down she wandered. Up and down, up and down, up and down, up and down.’ Like, the actual words are saying that she wandered up and down a hill to meet her boyfriend. But, like, the voice leading and stuff of the music, it sounds like sex. Like, and that’s quite deliberate, apparently. I mean, they were quite dirty, these madrigals, at the time.
So we used the same kind of-, inspired by those kind of techniques, like rhyme that we just kind of hold back on and replace with ‘fa la la la’, like I did have the c-word in there but you’ll be proud of me because I rewrote the verse so that we just go as far as the f-word but not the c-word. It’s a really good rhyme with the c-word.
I love the assumption that I would be proud of you. Like I’m a person who would never ever use the c-word.
No, no, I mean proud of me as in, you know, it’s a literary achievement for me to change the-, okay, maybe I meant-, well, I don’t know. I was proud of me. Because I was like, you know when you have to kill your darlings or something, and you’re like, ‘I’m gonna kill this, but I’m gonna replace it with something better,’ like that’s the challenge?
And so I actually felt like-, I was proud, because I felt like, ‘Actually, this is a better verse than it was when it rhymed, you know, like, ‘Kick her in the-,’’ You know, I’d replaced it with something better, and I felt good about that, because it was better. And still dirty.
Kick her in the fa la la la la.
Yeah, because I felt like-, you know, like, we talk about male genitalia quite a lot, and we make jokes about it, but it’s actually-, if it’s a woman getting annoyed with another woman, when you’re going to reference sexual-, you know, it doesn’t pass the Bechdel Test. Women getting nasty with other women, I think is, like-, I really like that material, in TV and film and games. I feel like it’s underexplored.
Final digression. The first writing I ever did was on Pony Friends 2. It’s a pony game. I fucking hate horses. But I did the research, I designed the quest system, and I wrote all the quests for Pony Friends 2. And I was the only woman on the project. And then I left to go to France, because I like France, and I like cheese and stuff. But apparently after I left, like, the guys were sitting around going, ‘Wow, but this is a game for girls. Like, we want to make them feel good. But there seems to be, like, a rivalry between the pony club captain and the player. Like, that seems a bit mean.’
[Laughter]
And this is, like, for 11-14 year old girls, and I felt like, ‘Oh my God, did you not know girls?’ ‘Oh, there seems to be a rivalry between the hot guy at the pony store, the store that sells pony equipment, shouldn’t he be really nice to her instead of challenging-,’ Like, ‘God, no, do you know nothing about teen romance?’ You see it on TV. There’s plenty of women and young girls having spats on TV and stuff. Why was this, you know, group of dudes who were like, ‘But girls are nice to each other, and they give each-,’
Remember in the 90s there was that girl game kind of phase, briefly in the 90s, where it’s like, you’d have games for girls, specifically for girls, that would be, like, all hearts and flowers and unicorns, and then you’d do something and it would be like, ‘You are a special person. Yay, friendship!’ It’s like, ‘What?’
[Laughter] Whose experience is this based on?
I know! Like, me and my friends at that age, we were reading Barbara Taylor Bradford and Stephen King. You know, in the girl stuff, or even Baby-Sitters Club, or Judy Blume books and stuff, girl stuff is, like, socially sophisticated one-upmanship, manipulation, you know. I don’t know. But also in a good way as well. Not fucking getting affirmed all the time, ‘Oh well, you lost that challenge but you’re still a good person.’ Fuck no, you don’t want that.
[Laughter]
Anyway, that’s the end of my digression.
That’s okay. I think that’s the end of the interview.
MUSIC
If you want to hear more conversations like this one, please subscribe to Talking Simulator in your favourite podcast app. We got a lovely review of our first episode on Apple Podcasts, and we’d love to see more if you’ve got five minutes to add your own. You can also tweet us your thoughts @talkingsimpod. I’m @jericawebber, and Katharine is @haikus_by_kn. Our music is by Jazz Mickle. You can find her @jazzmickle. Talking Simulator is edited by Leamington’s loveliest audio person, Dan Parkes. If you need to make something sound good, you can find him @dancparkes. I’m Jordan Erica Webber. Talk again soon.
MUSIC
Okay. Wow, I really can’t eat cake while I interview people.
Especially with the video, because it makes people jealous.
I’m sorry.
But you did put all the effort into making that cake, so you deserve it.
