A Single Ouroboros Scale--My Postmortem

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<big><big>A Single Ouroboros Scale: My Postmortem</big></big> by Naomi Norbez This game containsprominent discussion of community/individual expectations vs reality vs self; themes of death, depression, legacy, meaningful living/creating; and medical memory loss. <big>[[Click Here To Begin Reading|1]]</big>

Greetings! This Twine is a reflection on my Spring Thing 2022 game, A Single Ouroboros Scale. It’s recommended that you [[play it|https://www.springthing.net/2022/play_online/ASingleOuroborosScale/A%20Single%20Ouroboros%20Scale.html]] before reading this. You can also be a rebel and, like, not if that’s what you want. I’m not your boss, after all! With that said, [[click here to continue to the meat of this essay.|chs]]

[[Chapter 1: The Backdrop|ch1]] [[Chapter 2: Production Notes|ch2]] [[Chapter 3: The Script|ch3]] [[Chapter 4: Curtain Call|ch4]]

In March of 2020, I made [[A Single Ouroboros Scale|https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=tzb8ia87bki512o]]. In that game, you play as a new volunteer moderator for the Jot Archive Volunteer Project (JAVP), which is working on saving an interactive fiction Twitter-esque platform called Jot. You are tasked with checking the profile of Algie Freyir, a hypertext creator, and deciding [[whether it is worthy of staying in the JAVP server, or must be deleted.|ch1.1]]

In this chapter, we dig into the backstory and surface elements of ASOS. [[Algie was not the main character at first. The original idea centered around a woman named Tiea|ch2.1]], and the synopsis was as follows: “A mouse named Tiea reflects on the anguish of churning out stuff for the internet. Eventually, she comes to this conclusion: ‘There is no peace in content creation.’” From the beginning, this was a story about being a content creator, and specifically my experience doing so from 2015 until present day. About how maybe all your legacy will be is a little corner of the internet that people might stumble across once in a while. And whether that is comforting or maddening (something I’ll discuss later).

Algie’s journey mirrors my own exactly. Started making interactive fictions just before college; thought he was a Christian girl but turned out to be a transmasc fella who eventually became an atheist; released IF stories every year from 2015 onwards; and suffered from a debilitating brain illness in 2022. Algie eventually forgetting everything was basically my worst nightmare come to life, and I didn’t want to shy away from depicting that. [[I’m not going to go over every single jot, of course; that would take up a great deal of time. But I’ll look over the ones I find most relevant.|ch3.1]]

That’s about all I have for you today! If you have any questions or want to discuss the game, you can contact me on Twitter [[@NaomiNorbez|https://twitter.com/NaomiNorbez]] or email me at bezthezebro@gmail.com , which is my main email address these days, since I can’t access my old one in recovery. Thanks for reading this postmortem. I’m in a very different place now compared to when I made ASOS, so I wanted to reflect on it’s development. I hope you found reading this worthwhile. And if there are parts of the game you want to know about, or things about ASOS that you feel I should address, let me know! I would love to update the game to add more if you all want that. Have a great day! P.S. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIdwXF7zeac [[(Return to the Chapter Select Screen)|chs]]

To be frank with you, the reason ASOS exists is because [[I thought it would be my last game I would never be able to make.|ch1.2]] I talk about this in the game’s author’s notes a bit, but I really want to impress upon you the existential nightmare that was my life at the time. My memory was going at a rapid rate, no one knew why, and no one could stop it. I was losing the ability to work and function and be a human being like everyone else. I was “blanking out” on basic things, like what hand I hold my fork in, and what side of the faucet is the hot side. Sure, these things came back in time, but they seemed to strongly foreshadow a larger decline. It felt like at the rate I was going, I was going to lose not only my memory, but my cognitive ability to make and create the very thing that I was so passionate about: written stories, and specifically, interactive fiction video games.

I saw Spring Thing as a lighthouse in the distant night, one I had to swim to before it was too late. I had to get a game out for the festival; I had to have a last word on my life before I could no longer say or create words anymore. But how do you decide on what your very last word should be in the interactive fiction space you love so much? Well, I am embarrassed to say that quite a bit of those last words came from a place of anger that I felt at the time. I was very upset with the interactive fiction community, and I saw a very strong bias toward parsers & cis male developers, and a strong distaste toward hypertext games and the marginalized developers behind them. [[I wanted to make a project that talked about this and hope that in its creation and release it would somehow make change come about.|ch1.3]]

At the same time, I wanted to reflect on my career as a whole because I was very convinced that the “me” that I saw myself as was about to die. I want to look back on the years I had been the interactive fiction community, the things I had made, the projects I have produced. Because I was strongly convinced that by the time Spring Thing came around the next year (2023), my memory would be mush, and I would be in some kind of care facility unable to function or cognitively think in much of a way at all. [[That was what fueled the development. Frantic desperation for a last word on one’s life before that life became snuffed out.|ch1.4]] I typed as if a hand would yank me away at any moment from the keyboard; I made the game at a rapid rate in a panicked state of mind, fueled by emotional vigor. A lot of my games are very personal, and fueled by emotion, but this one was that cranked up to 11. I don’t think I’ve ever been so emotionally driven in the creation of a game since I made Bi Lines. And even then, that was nothing compared to this.

Here's the thing. At first, when writing this, looking back on the development of ASOS made me very upset at myself, and I cringed at my stupidity. How could I believe that I was going to die, when I have so obviously survived the crisis, I asked myself? But at present, I try to be kind to that version of myself, and remember that they were very, very sick. They were strongly affected by brain damage, unable to truly and fully see any hope on the other side, and rotting away thanks to the pseudo-dementia enveloping their brain. I try to be gracious towards Bez From March 2022, because though it’s easy to laugh at that person in hindsight, and shake my head at how foolish they were, they didn’t know they would survive this. [[It was not yet clear whether I would come out of this alive as myself, and it at the time looked highly unlikely.|ch1.5]]

I think the biggest thing to know about the development of ASOS is that I was not in my whole clear mind while making it. The pseudo-dementia had really eaten away at my cognitive capacity, causing extreme executive dysfunction and greatly reduced intellect. Writing, the thing I have done naturally since I was five years old, became a laborious tax to even Sisyphus couldn’t do. Typing each word, focusing on the draft, and remembering vocabulary became laborious. And that’s not even talking about how my brain drove me to do some very silly & dumb things because—and [[I cannot stress this point enough—in my mentally incapacitated state, they seemed madly important at the time, as if I would cease to exist if they didn’t get done.|cj1.6]] Some of those things are objectively very silly. For example, the Twitter thread I made on the history and development of Chick Tracts, a bigoted Christian comic company specializing in tiny pamphlets. I think it’s a very insightful thread looking back at it, but was it something that put my very life at stake? Absolutely not. But it truly felt that important, and I spent four hours of my life getting invested in research, unable to turn away from my computer until the thread was finished.

Now, you might be asking yourself: 4 hours of non-stop work is a long time, isn’t it? Well, that lets me go to the next part of my pseudo-dementia, which is the time blindness I had. I mean that in a very literal sense: I experienced the time at 1/3 of the speed that everyone else. For every 3 hours that passed, it felt to me like 1 hour. For every 30 minutes that passed, it felt like 10 minutes. This was surprisingly consistent across the board, and it made time go by like nothing. Days sifted through my fingers like sand because time flew by like never before. So, as you can imagine, it’s a bit difficult to develop a game on a deadline when time itself feels like it’s fighting you, mocking you every move. But I did it, because as I have stressed earlier in this text, it felt like my life would cease to exist if it didn’t get done. Surely, when the stakes of my existence felt so high, I logically should have been invested in more important things, like writing a will, or some other such task that one does at the end of their life. But my sick brain made me fixated on doing “smaller” things, blowing them up into essential tasks. My Spring Thing project was one of those things. [[(Continue to Chapter 2)|ch2]] [[(Return to the Chapter Select Screen)|chs]]

I always pictured the game as taking place on a social media site. At first, the social media site was called Blip, but I was worried that it might be confused with Blip.Tv, an old video-sharing platform that many independent content creators flocked to before it shut down. Still, that could have been to my advantage, I reasoned, because my Blip was pictured as a video-sharing platform similar to TikTok. Tiea’s arc was basically the same as Algie’s: [[she starts out optimistic about releasing content for people online, but grows bitter and desperate to see the point.|ch2.2]] The original ending really drills this point home, as you can read in my original notes: “The last video is this long, despair-filled rant about how Tiea feels about producing content and how she's probably gonna quit but she'll be replaced by somebody new anyway, so why does it matter? Sure enough, after the video is done, the algorithym confirms that last point: the screen says, "You have watched all of Tiea's videos! Here are some recommended creators: [shows 3 other profiles]". The content machine recommends others when you burn out and stop creating; it is a neverending cycle of production where if you stop, there are plenty of others to replace you. This is what the internet is now.”

I planned to make Tiea’s videos basically colored animatics, with a few drawings for each different facial expression/body movement. But since I was strapped for time, I had to scrap the video-sharing platform idea, and so, I decided on a Twitter-esque platform instead (so I could write short but impactful things, instead of needing to write large amounts of text). I renamed it to Jot, and since I realized that I specifically wanted to discuss the interactive fiction community, and not content creation in a general sense, I made Jot an IF-specific social media site. I also realized I wanted to discuss all of this in relation to my current illness, [[and so, Algie Freyir was born.|ch2.3]] Algie’s namesake and appearance are both references to Flowers For Algernon, a story about a mentally disabled man who gains massive intelligence thanks to a science experiment, but then loses it, and regresses back to his former state before dying. The titular Algernon is a white mouse, the first subject of the experiment before the main character became its human test.

I tried to make this clear in the game, but in case you missed it: Algie is basically a microphone for me to speak through. This is how I put it in the author’s note at the end: “Algie is also a way of me speaking through a fictional character/journey to say things I have wanted to express, ponder my own journey and the various facets of it.” [[The character was a way for me to reflect on my time in the interactive fiction world, and say something about it before it was too late.|ch2.4]] The various writings had a different structure at first. Once ASOS became tweets instead of videos, and the JAVP idea was in place, I pondered the game being a puzzle of sorts. I was going to sort Algie’s messages into various categories, not by date but by topic, and the player would try to piece together what order they were in as they read each one. But as I was finishing the script, I quickly realized that the narrative would fall apart with this kind of mechanic. It would lose its impact, and become a severed mess, fighting against the very goal of the text. So I kept it organized by year instead.

The titular ouroboros is mainly referring to these jot that Algie writes: ” Like it makes sense that if you play parsers you're gonna approach an IF for different reasons, but like. Idk. Maybe I'm just naive but why would you want to play a game medium the same way always, and want to keep it the same as long as possible, so badly that you reject the story space eclipsing the system one in various titles? (3/4) It's stupid and weird and very ouroboros to me. With the IF community being the head & Twine (Revolution) being the tail. If you're only gonna accept hypertext as great in certain terms/circumstances that align more with the system POV, and shut out the rest, maybe reconsider b/c that's Cringe. (4/4)” It was first conjured up as a symbol for the interactive fiction community as a whole, with individual creators being the scales of the snake (thus why Algie is “a single ouroboros scale”). But the ouroboros also represents a few other things, mainly my endless of cycle of seeking satisfaction even though every time I found it, I moved the goalpost out further, and the journey restarted again. That is depicted in this jot: “ Does anybody ever die satisfied? I'm pretty sure no matter how successful you are or big you get, you got loose ends SOMEWHERE. And that's kinda reassuring? But I also feel like I gotta die "right"/"well", y'know? Which means seeking satisfaction there. But I won't be satisfied. But I keep trying. Endless ouroboros.” And this one: ” I feel like my need for external approval is an ouroboros that will never EVER be fulfilled. Either I seek it and don't get it (often) or I seek it and do get the level I wanted (rare) but it ain't enough. My goal is so far away, and it keeps moving, so maybe I gotta lower my damn expectations--towards myself and in the IF world.” I’ll touch on how my journey for satisfaction has changed in Chapter 3. And no, I won’t be explaining what the ouroboros in this jot means: ‘the quiet comprewhending of the ending of it all. . .’ ouroboros gonna eatt me alive haaha” [[That’s up to your interpretation.|ch2.5]]

Also, let’s talk about the Jot Archive Volunteer Project, or JAVP. I say this about it in the ending author’s note: “The JAVP and Robert Evans’s vision/execution could be an ‘IF dystopia’ as one beta tester put it, or an alternate future closer to our reality—up to you, but I do want to raise the question of how IF history is remembered/recorded. Not to question anyone in particular to be 100% clear (I had nobody at all in mind when writing this piece or Evans), but just to ask the question in general.” All of that is true, to be clear. As I said in the opening author’s note, “This is basically a compilation of stuff I've heard over misc. time periods squished into a game, and not meant to be a personal callout/attack/cancelling/anything like that. I am not that much of a douchebag (I’d like to think so anyway), and am not trying to bash/subtweet any specific person here.” But [[I definitely think that I was more cynical than I could have been in my writing of Evans, mainly because I was depicting my worst nightmare of what could happen after I die.|ch2.6]] Evans saying that Algie is not important enough to be saved in interactive fiction history was basically my worst fear at the time come to life, and my own cynical imaginings of what would happen to me after I died. I was scared of being erased once I left this world, of being nothing but a blip that gets removed from the records of history. Of time moving on without me, and forgetting me as a result. Evans misgendering me is just the cherry on top of the shit cake.

Finally, I’ll touch on my last sentence of the final author notes: “If that [contact information] doesn’t work, try the other email (what that means you will have to figure out yourself).” This was meant to lead players to finding the other email address I hid in the game, which was on the Jot logo screen: anonymouscommenterb@gmail.com. Upon emailing it, [[you get an auto-reply that reads the following:|ch2.7]]

Subject: AUTO-REPLY: Final Words About Jot (from Ted Iger, Creator/Moderator) Body: To whoever is trying to reach me, This is Ted Iger, the guy who moderated and made the failed IF community experiment, Jot, and stupidly made the mod email a dumb joke account he threw together in college (boy, do I have regrets there, haha! But anyway). I'm writing this while my mind is still sharp. If you're emailing this account, then you probably know who I am already. But I figured I'd state it in case there was any confusion, or somebody put the wrong address or something, haha. If you're just some random confused person, feel free to delete this from your inbox; I promise you won't offend me from beyond the grave. . . . Ok, did they delete? Alright then, to those who are still here, let's talk about those who are reaching out concerning Jot. I'm sure you have questions about the shutdown. And I'm afraid there isn't much more I can add to what I've already said in the "Farewell To Jot" community writeup, or any subsequent staff posts. Jot failed because I could not afford the server costs, mainly due to of my various ailments that will soon lead to my untimely demise. I had to shut the site down because of that, and I'm sorry I disappointed you by taking this space away. When I put up that first goodbye post, I didn't know what to expect. And there was a lot of anger and disbelief. I got some . . . unfortunate emails/messages that day. I didn't like it, but I do get it, and I knew it was going to happen. But there was also a lot of kindness. If there's one thing I know about us, it's that the interactive fiction community can be a giving bunch. There were some who offered to help launch a fundraising campaign for my medical bills &/or the server costs. And while I appreciated the offer, I had & have to decline them all, for two reasons: 1. Concerning myself: I am dying. That much is clear. I've thought a lot about what that means, as any medical path I go on would only prolong my pain instead of remove it. I have accepted my own end, and do not plan to change anything about that medically. So there would be no real point in raising funds for any sort of procedure, I'm afraid, because I am not seeking any. 2. Concerning Jot: moderating this community has been such a challenge. The in-fighting, dismissal, and harassment is just as present as the cooperation, acceptance, and goodness. I sat down with myself many times over the years, wondering if, in trying to create a space for the craft I love and those within it, I had instead cultivated a haven for the worst of our community to have a louder voice. That's not to say I never did my job--I've told offenders to cool it, suspended them, froze them, banned then, everything I could from a moderation perspective. But there were always more, and always negativity that I could not control with the site guidelines alone. Thus, I have decided to see the fact that I can no longer afford the server costs not as a tragedy, but as a sign. A sign that I honestly needed, one to let this haven finally collapse inward. I hope that answers your questions. If you have more, I'm afraid I won't be around to answer them very soon. And even if I don't go as soon as I think, I'd like to spend my final time on Earth being with the people I love, not replying to strangers online. So I apologize, but this is my last word to you. [[Thank you for reading, and thank you for being on Jot. I hope that despite all the things I said above, there was goodness in your experience there.|ch2.8]] Farewell, Theodore Oscar Iger (equal lover of [[lost pigs|https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=mohwfk47yjzii14w]] and [[howling dogs|https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=mxj7xp4nffia9rbj]])”

This letter was intended to touch on some of ASOS’s bigger themes, and wrap up loose ends in the story’s lore. Theodore & Algie’s stories interconnect, despite their very different positions within Jot. If you found this email through the intended method by reaching out to the anonymouscommenterb@gmail.com account, please let me know! That about wraps up this section. In the next chapter, I look deeper into Algie’s jots. [[(Continue to Chapter 3)|ch3]] [[(Return to the Chapter Select Screen)|chs]]

A lot of Algie’s jots are about not feeling like he belongs in the interactive fiction world. He is a marginalized hypertext creator, and sees white cis dude making parsers as the ones getting most of the praise. This is something I’ve seen a lot of during my time in the space, though it does seem to be shifting a bit (more on that in Chapter 4). I wanted people to see how difficult it is to exist in a space that doesn’t seem to fully want you there. Though that loneliness also seemed more severe due to my depression at the time. A lot of the jots about this leave me with mixed feelings upon rereading them. On one hand, there is a point to be made here. [[ On the other hand, some of them seem to mean, and do reflect how seeped my mind was in negative feelings.|ch3.2]] This jot is a great example: IF world/community: We're a great medium to start playing/making games in! Join us and let's make cool things together! Also IF world/community: That's a hypertext and doesn't follow the Zork Law established in 1977 so you don't reaaaaaaaly belong here, do you? Thanks, I hate it! /hj

And there are a lot of jots I read now that [[seem to reflect how much stock I put into what people thought of me & my work|ch3.3]]: ” I fuckng love Twines about personal gender feels/discovery. “All Tomorrow's Parties”, “this is you”. . . I would love to release a game like that for y'all but I KNOW it would be torn to shreds so maybe not haha. I'll probs save those stories for the people who aren't gonna be weird about it, ty. (1/2) Idk. I already share ENOUGH about myself in my IF so making a deeper personal gender work, KNOWING that the community is gonna dissect it like they're critics of a anti-parser graduate-level paper and not reading an intimate nonfiction essay would be SUPER NOT FUN. So nah. (2/2)”

A lot of the jots really bring to the forefront the things I was struggling to reconcile at the time: mainly, my fear of death and “[[not dying well|ch3.4]]”, as well as my fight for my life to have a meaning/purpose. It’s clear to me that I tied a lot of my life being meaningful to me & my work being recognized in a positive way. That’s something that’s definitely changed since I wrote ASOS, which I’ll discuss at the end of this chapter.

(By the way, this jot: “IF world: Hey, this top-tier game is by a gay dude and features a prominent gay character! Isn't that inclusive and rad! Me: Yeah!!! So does that mean that more non-cis-dudes & marginalized IF makers are gonna get more inclusivity here too? Or is it just in the odd creator & characters that you give us space? IF world: . . . IF world: Idk why THAT came up, back on topic. ANYWAY we were talking about parsers by dudes and how inclusive the community is. . . /hj (I can't say much in 1 jot but that's the jist lol)” Is referencing The Wizard Sniffer. I somewhat regret writing this jot, not because I don’t think it doesn’t have a point, but because I’ve not 100% completed The Wizard Sniffer, so [[I could be talking out of my ass and not know it.|ch3.5]])

And speaking of dying, I will talk about Algie’s 2022 jots for a bit. All of those worries were ones I had, and the climbing number of typos in those jots? That was a depiction of what was really happening to me at the time. Because of my cognitive decline, I was finding it very difficult to do writing, and every single time I typed anything at all, there were a slew of typos that I had to go back and fix. [[It was a very bizarre effect of the pseud-dementia, and made communication with the people I hold dear much, much harder than it normally would be.|ch3.6]]

Finally, I will touch on Algie leaving the IF world. This was a depiction of the time I decided to go on hiatus from interactive fiction. Online creation in general, sure, but mainly interactive fiction. Yes, that was something I really did—I even made the date Algie leaves IF the same as the date I decided to do it: November 19th, 2021. Here’s some backstory for those of you who didn’t know about that: I created 2 interlinked games for the Interactive Fiction Competition 2021: [[The Dead Account|https://norbez.itch.io/the-dead-account]] & [[Weird Grief|https://norbez.itch.io/weird-grief]]. Both games are about a dead man and those who mourn him, from very different perspectives. I kept reading reviews that complained about the game not having enough choices to be a real interactive fiction game, and that really disheartened me, made me question why I was making games for this space in the first place. I’ve heard similar things throughout the years, and it’s always discouraging. But it especially got to me this time, and so, [[I decided to leave|https://intfiction.org/t/a-post-mortem-of-the-dead-account-weird-grief-my-game-development-career-for-now/53498]]. This jot of Algie’s perfectly encapsulates my feelings about leaving at the time: “Since I left Christianity I fear death like 20x more, which sucks. And I think more about what I'll leave behind. I want to leave a piece of me inside the internet through the things I make, a digital artifact that represents what I am. [[Maybe that's why I do this shit. Maybe that’s why it was so hard to stop.|ch3.7]]”

It’s very similar to another jot, one that stuck out to me a lot when I reread the script. I mentioned it in the previous chapter, but here it is again for those who need to reread: “I feel like my need for external approval is an ouroboros that will never EVER be fulfilled. Either I seek it and don’t get it (often) or I seek it and do get the level I wanted (rare) but it ain’t enough. My goal is so far away, and it keeps moving, so maybe I gotta lower my damn expectations—towards myself and in the IF world.” I wrote this because it was truly how I felt at the time, but one year later, my mindset is quite different. I’ve been through a long period of mental health recovery, because the way to get rid of pseudo-dementia is to treat the mental health problems causing the brain to produce the dementia-like symptoms. If you’ve never been through mental health recovery, it is a very reflective time, where one analyzes many aspects of not only their personal history, but their inner mechanisms, what motivates them to act in the ways they do. [[One of the things I have I ended up analyzing during my recovery is why I create interactive fictions, why I create in the first place generally; and whether I want to leave the IF space for good, or stay.|ch3.8]]

I ended up realizing that I’ve always hoped my IF games could springboard me into a narrative design job, but because that never ended up happening, I began to wonder if IF in general was a waste of time. I also realized that I create the things I do because I want to help people empathize & learn more about experiences that they may not know about. I’ve been calling my efforts “emotional education” for a few years now, because want to teach about things like trauma & depression, and during my recovery, I came to realize that this is what I feel the meaning of my life is. Using IF to tell these stories is one of the avenues through which I seek to fulfill my purpose, do the thing that I truly life for, in the hope that it will help somebody else. [[And if that’s what I truly want, then what does it matter whether I get a narrative design job out of it?|ch3.9]]

Yes, we all have to pay the bills. But [[what pays the bills and what we live to do, well, those don’t have to be the same.|ch3.10]] And once I realized this, I realized that I had been bitter about my place in IF partially because I felt that since I’d been making games for all these years, I should have a career advantage out of it by now. But life doesn’t work like that, and once I let that bitterness go, I let go of a burden that I had been holding for a long time, without even realizing it. And it set me free to create what I desire, without including the pressure of job security, because I can seek that elsewhere.

I was also able to better understand by need for external approval, my desire for people to like my work or like me. I realized that even though I don’t make my games for them to be “liked”, I still have a basic desire for praise. I want people to see everything that I see in a work, even though I know that such a thing is logically impossible. And I was able to let go of that, because [[if my games are able to help people, there are always going to be people who don’t see the greater point I’m trying to make.|ch3.11]] And that’s ok! The only thing to do is keep moving forward.

I talked earlier about how Evans’ actions was basically my worst nightmare depicted in the text: of being erased and forgotten by history. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned during my time in recovery—of being away from “the real world” in mental health centers, and then coming out of that and into a changed world—it’s that the Earth will move on without me, and I have to be ok with that. While I won’t say that I’m 100% not scared of that anymore, I have made peace with the idea of being “a vapor, a blinking light”, as a song from my childhood put it. You exist, and then you’re gone. The only thing you can do while you’re here is be the brightest light you can, for those who are here, and those who are coming after. That’s why I believe I’m here, at least. [[(Continue to Afterward)|ch4]] [[(Return to the Chapter Select Screen)|chs]]

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