Interment: Showcase and Responses

Since releasing our narrative puzzle game Interment to the public in April, I’ve had the pleasure of being able to watch several people play it through.

It’s the kind of game that’s really compelling to watch other people play, because the journeys players take are so varied each time. Each player notices different details and draws different connections between them to get to the answers.

For the same reason, Interment also lends itself to being played collectively, by two or more people around the same screen, as the different observations each individual makes can guide the group’s decisions.

I’ve watched people play the game individually and collectively. But one thing that is common across both playstyles is that people often opt to make handwritten notes while they are playing, to keep track of information presented to them by the game.

I love watching this happen. There’s a moment where people quickly realise there are deeper layers of significance or connection between these bits of information, and their instinct to write them down adds an extra embodied dimension to the role players adopt.

Some of my favourite games provoke the same reaction: the likes of Return of the Obra Dinn and Sam Barlow’s games Telling Lies and HerStory. One of the previous games I was involved in making, the theatrical detective mystery experience Interrobang?!, actively encouraged this. We even included an interactive evidence board as part of the experience.

For Interment, the most common notes people made were drawings of family trees, as players sought to understand how the characters buried in the Hawthorn family graveyard were linked to each other. Maps of the graveyard were also common, as people wanted to have the information from each gravestone to hand when looking through the graveyard’s archive documents. Little diagrams of connections between characters and/or documents, key dates, names and theories were the other details that would frequently show up in players’ notes.

It’s fair to say that I’ve enjoyed watching people make sense of the game’s world, slowly unravelling the threads that tie it together and re-assembling it in their own unique ways.

On 5^th May, Interment was showcased as part of the Pervasive Media Studio’s monthly social event, First Friday. This gave me the opportunity to observe how a large audience of players reacted to the game.

For this event, with the fantastic support of the Studio team, we were able to set up six laptops with headphones for attendees to play the game, as well as a larger screen where we could demonstrate the game in front of an audience.

Of course, I also made sure each player had pens and paper to hand.

Credit for all event images: Shamphat Photography

The event was very well attended and the laptops were occupied throughout, with lots of people giving the game a try (there were perhaps 60-70 people in the Studio that evening). Many players gave the game 5-10 minutes of their time and then took the game’s details from our posters to finish it at home. One person did manage to complete the entire game during the event, which was very impressive in the limited time available.

There were a couple of attendees who got very engrossed in solving the puzzle and would’ve liked to spend more time on it, but were limited by the timing of the event. Even so, it was heartening to see that the little game we put together in 48 hours inspired such deep engagement.

The feedback people gave us was positive too. As an hour-long event that is primarily for networking with other people, attendees dipping in and out obviously wouldn’t have time to unravel all the intricacies of a narrative that’s typically experienced over 30 minutes. Yet players told us they appreciated the level of detail in the game and enjoyed the time they could commit to it. I was told by several people that they wanted to go back to the game at home so they could take the time to delve into the world properly.

As the game’s creators, we’re very aware of the limitations that the 48-hour development time imposed upon what we made. Even if we’d had all the time and resource in the world to perfect it, the game wouldn’t have been everyone’s cup of tea. Happily, these limitations didn’t seem to hold much sway in players’ opinions of the game.

All of the feedback we received during the event was told to us directly. However, I did get sent one generous piece of written feedback from a Studio member who played the game in their own time:

“I really enjoyed playing it, you did a great job creating an engaging narrative and I enjoyed the graphics and sound design. I got super focused in the first few minutes and went into detective mode scribbling away which I didn’t expect to do straight away, you’ve done a great job at hooking people in quickly and keeping them involved.”

If you’d like to try Interment for yourself, it’s free to download on Windows and Mac here and takes roughly 30 minutes to complete.

I’d love to hear your comments on the game if you do try it. And do feel free to send me any scribbled notes or esoteric diagrams you make while playing!

Read more about the making of Interment here.

Interment: making a prize-winning game in 48 hours

For the past five years, I’ve been making games which explore our relationships with the places we live in. These games have all been location-based: taking place outdoors and focusing on interacting with your physical environment. However, until now, I hadn’t been involved in making a fully digital game.

This changed when I learnt about Global Game Jam (GGJ). GGJ is the world’s largest game creation event, bringing together tens of thousands of participants in locations all over the world. Over 48 hours, participants are tasked with creating a game that responds to a central theme revealed when the jam begins. This year, the theme was ‘roots’.

Following the reveal, everybody at the Bristol site where I was participating gathered to form teams. After meeting Grace Ball, a writer who shared my interest in designing a story-rich game, we met Josh Regan, a programmer who would make the interactive parts of our game work. His brother, musician Frank Regan, later joined us to bring our world to life through sound design.

Out of nothing, we had a multi-skilled team of four people who had never worked together before (even the brothers!).

What we ended up with 48 hours later was a narrative puzzle game called Interment.

Interment is about the connection between the stories of our ancestors and the stories we make today.

You play as a contractor for developers who are planning to build houses on an old family graveyard. As part of the planning permission, the graves must be reinterred elsewhere with accurately named headstones. Your job is to match the currently unreadable, crumbling headstones to the correct person using archive material and clues in the graveyard itself.

This archive consists of transcripts of documents belonging to family members buried in the graveyard, including a will, diary entry, death certificate, letters and even song lyrics. In these, you get a fleeting sense of the family members’ lives and relationships.

My role in the team was as a narrative designer and writer, working with Grace to build the fictional world of the game.

The first stage of this process was ideation with the entire team on the first evening of the jam, simply using pen and paper.

Our initial responses to the jam theme led to the idea of an old graveyard with headstones that were barely legible anymore. We talked about making a game that involved uncovering the mysteries behind the graveyard, using historic evidence and the scraps of information you could still glean from the headstones, like motifs, initials, types of stone and objects positioned next to the stones.

In asking the question of what fictional justification there could be for deciphering who was buried in an old graveyard, I came up with the idea that the graves were being re-interred elsewhere. The player needed to work out exactly where each person was buried to ensure they would have accurate headstones in their new resting places.

With this basic idea and some initial character designs, we all got on with our individual tasks. Josh developed the 2D graveyard environment in Unity; Frank worked on musical motifs for each character and the game’s theme music. For Grace and I, the task was fleshing out the game’s characters and their stories.

In most cases, we already had a rough idea of what kinds of stories would be interesting to tell in a family graveyard environment. Our job was to create pieces of archive evidence that communicated these characters’ stories – and indicated which graves they were associated with – in an interesting and evocative way.

As this was a puzzle game, we wanted the player’s discovery of the stories and their associated graves to involve a satisfying degree of thought and interpretation. This meant thinking carefully about the relationship between the fabula (the factual events/details of the story) and the syuzhet (how the narrative information would be represented to, and encountered by, the player).

Our design process involved deciding which bits of information would be shared with the player upfront, which would be subtext (i.e. implied or inferred), which would need deciphering based on several smaller bits of information, and which details would be left to the player’s imagination. We also had to think carefully about what order players would encounter different narrative details.

All these factors influenced the writing we did: the types of documents we created, the writing style and the level of detail contained in each piece of text. For example, because we knew the gameplay would involve interpreting relationships between characters, the archive evidence we created would often tie two or more characters together (e.g. a letter from one character to another, or a document that mentions multiple characters).

We used a shared Google Doc to write and edit the game’s text in tandem and decide on its positioning, as well as pen and paper to sketch out the boundaries, relationships and intricacies of the fictional world. Two sketches in particular were crucial here.

The first was a family tree, to visualise how the characters were related to each other, when they were born and when they died. This was important to ensure we were consistent with all of the dates and names we mentioned in our documents (making a mistake with these details could make the puzzle impossible to solve!).

The second was a sketch map of the graveyard, to show how all the individual narrative details would be portrayed within the game’s environment. This not only helped our programmer Josh to know where each piece of content should appear, but also made it easy for us, as narrative designers, to keep in mind exactly what the player would be seeing and hearing at any point.

By having this at the forefront of our thinking, we could design the game such that players would encounter information in a way that was satisfying for unravelling the mystery of the graveyard.

At the end of the jam, each team presented their game to the other participants and a panel of judges.

To our amazement, Interment won the Bristol jam’s Grand Prize. The judges praised the completeness of the game, how it responded to the jam’s theme and the detail in the game’s design.

We each won a mug labelled ‘Global Games Jam Winner 2023’ and some chocolates.

Having since fixed a few small bugs in the game, we have now released Interment to the public, where you can download and play it for free on Windows and Mac.

It will take most people about 30 minutes to complete.

Overall, we’re really proud of what we were able to make in such a small period of time. We hope the game is both enjoyable and makes players think, reflecting on what it is to have roots in a place and what it means when these roots are severed.

Interrobang?!: The Curious Departure of Dustin Spektor

This Wednesday 20th October sees the launch of Interrobang?!, a genre-busting theatre-meets-online gaming experience that draws you into a real-time thriller, where you become the investigator in a shadowy murder case.

It’s a unique experience full of intriguing characters, interviews, challenges, moral quandaries and puzzles. It’s theatre away from the theatre, and gaming away from the console.

Players use QR code technology and a custom-made website to take a journey through multiple digital spaces. You’ll delve into a database of documents and video interviews, with original music and the odd surreal musical number.

And that’s just what you can play from home. Take your sleuthing outside in Interrobang?! Local, an immersive location-based audio experience that expands the Interrobang?! universe.

Set in the town of Brentford, decipher the locations of hidden messages to uncover the mystery of powerful forces shaping the very places we live. Look out for copies of The Echo newspaper at Watermans and other places around Brentford to begin your journey.        

Interrobang?! Has been created by trailblazing immersive theatre company Gideon Reeling in collaboration with StoryFutures and supported by Watermans, West London’s leading arts centre.

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Hopefully what is written above has whetted your appetite!

You may be wondering what connection I have to this thrilling project.

Throughout my PhD at Royal Holloway, I’ve been a consultant for StoryFutures, an initiative that helps to create and fund R&D projects focused on immersive storytelling. Part of their remit is to connect academics with companies and organisations that can benefit from their expertise.

Back in March, StoryFutures approached me to say they’d had an enquiry from a company called Gideon Reeling, who had just reached their crowdfunding target to develop an interactive murder mystery game. The game would be partly location-based, and they were looking to work with an academic who could help to finesse the user experience and game mechanics to achieve their vision for the project.

I’ve always been a massive fan of murder mysteries as a genre of fiction. And after looking at their Crowdfunder and learning more about Gideon Reeling’s vision, history and ventures as a company (they were once sister company to the immersive theatre pioneers Punchdrunk and have worked with huge names across different industries), I was sold.

Since then, my actual contribution to the development of Interrobang?! has morphed into something much more hybrid and more deeply invested. And I’ve loved every minute of it.

One of my main roles has been helping to shape the game’s narrative design.

In the initial pilot version of Interrobang?! that I tested, there was no website hosting the database of evidence you explore as a player. The whole mystery was divulged via documents, emails and QR codes contained within them, which led to videos.

I was blown away by the detail and intricacy of the story, as well as the acting and humour throughout. I was engrossed with the challenge of identifying the important details in the case and very satisfied when I’d correctly solved puzzles or noticed crucial bits of information.

But there was so much content that I had to play it over two days, taking over 10 hours in total! Part of that was down to me being the kind of player that wanted to note down every detail that might be important. But many of the videos were also very long.

It also wasn’t the smoothest experience moving between all the different pieces of evidence, via the individual documents and emails.

So together with the artistic directors and web developer at Gideon Reeling, we worked to make navigating the game content more intuitive, identify any plot holes and decide what could be cut down (e.g. times when evidence was corroborated by more than one character) to make the experience more streamlined.

One of the most impactful suggestions that I and other testers had was to host the game on an integrated website framed as a police database, which would allow players to view and move between the different pieces of information more smoothly.

I also thought it would be effective to incorporate the player’s note-taking and information-gathering process into this website, through something like an interactive evidence board.                                    

Both of these ambitions have come to fruition. The evidence documents and videos (now much shorter edits) are all accessed via the police database website, which has an interactive evidence board that updates depending on which information you’ve uncovered. It’s a much tighter, more user-friendly experience that envelops you in the Interrobang?! universe.

My other main role in working with Gideon Reeling has been to lead the development of the location-based element of Interrobang?!.

In the pilot version of the game, the only way the player’s physical location mattered was in the suggestion that players go to (or imagine they were in) certain kinds of places to watch the videos that loaded when the QR codes were scanned. The characters would say things like ‘go to the local church’ or ‘find somewhere quiet’, with the idea that the game could be played anywhere.

But we found that players unanimously preferred to be accessing evidence sitting at a desk, preferably in front of a computer, where they could easily take notes, watch/read things multiple times and not use lots of mobile data loading content on their devices. The story also stood so well by itself that being in certain kinds of places made little difference to how it was received.

Through my prior experience in location-based game design, I knew that this component of the game would need to be something much more bespoke; making the most of the specific affordances of engaging with material outside and in physical places.

This led to the creation of brand-new, tailored content that expands the Interrobang?! universe through the use of location-based audio. QR codes positioned around Brentford (home of Gideon Reeling and local arts centre partner Watermans) play a series of voice notes when scanned. These follow the story of one very important character and how they became entangled in the wider mystery and peril of Interrobang?!.

I would love to say more, but I can’t give too much away!

I’m proud to say that I came up with the concept behind this new design of Interrobang?! Local and also wrote the scripts for all of the voice notes, which I then edited together with Gideon Reeling.

Thankfully, Gideon were on-hand in Brentford to do the location scouting, place the QR codes and make the necessary local contacts to turn our vision into a reality.

So, again, when can you take part in these dual online and location-based experiences?

They launch officially this Wednesday, 20^th October!

This current version of Interrobang?! is live until 27^th January 2022. I say current version because Interrobang?! is an ongoing project. Not only will we be addressing any feedback from this run, but there are plans to add more exciting features to the game website in future versions.

Furthermore, we’re planning to bring the location-based experience to places other than Brentford, partnering with local theatres and arts companies across the country to bring a slice of Gideon Reeling’s immersive magic to different audiences. The script is deliberately designed to be adapted to other places and it’ll be fascinating to see how to story connects to a completely different set of sites.

I’m really excited to hear what people make of both the online and location-based aspects of the game. Do get in touch with me if you want to know more about the project or have any feedback that you want to share.          

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How to take part

Visit the Interrobang?! booking page on the Watermans website to book your ticket to play the game online. Tickets cost £15 and the game takes approximately 2-4 hours to complete. It is suitable for anyone aged 12 or over (contains moderate bad language).

You’ll be asked to provide an email address for each player.

Register to play by following the email link. Log in and begin.        

You’ll need a laptop or desktop for the best viewing experience and a trackpad, mouse or direction keys to make choices through the game.

To take part in the Interrobang?! location-based audio experience, look out for copies of The Echo newspaper at Watermans and other locations in the Brentford area. You’ll find everything you need in The Echo.

Exhibition Proposal

Over the winter break I had the challenge of completing two big pieces of coursework for my Masters. As well as a 4,000-word essay on public space, in which I investigated the implications of Public Space Protection Orders, I had a task that was somewhat less familiar.

This was a 3,500-word exhibition proposal, for which I had to set out my plans for a medium-sized, six-week exhibition on a geographical theme of my choice. Structured according to how proposals are typically written for museums and galleries in real life, I had to think about not only the overall concept of the exhibition, but also more practical considerations. This included the exhibition’s layout, its contents, educational and outreach components, the design of the panels, and the audience.

As such, it was quite different to the conventional academic pieces that I’m used to writing. Rather than repackaging other people’s ideas, I had to come up with clear ideas of my own, and a vision of how these could be practically presented to the public.

From the start I knew I was quite keen to diverge from conventional exhibition formats, where artworks and objects are put alongside panels that describe or give additional detail about them. How could I make the exhibition design more engaging, powerful and relevant?

My answer shaped the design of the whole exhibition: turn it into a game.

Rather than simply guiding visitors around the exhibition in a linear fashion, I wanted to challenge visitors to discover the story of the exhibition by themselves, giving them as little direction as possible. The visitors instead would be ‘detectives’ presented with a mystery, and the fun and intrigue of the installation would be in the task of solving it. For those familiar with the concept of psychogeography, this approach to the exhibition replicates how psychogeographers have explored and interpreted the city. This is also a technique that has been used in exploration or 'walking simulator' video games such as Gone Home and The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, which were a big inspiration for my own game-like design.

Perhaps unusually, I came up with this idea for the format before I even knew exactly what the topic of my exhibition would be. Fortunately, the internet provided me with two fantastic sources of inspiration that directed my thoughts towards my eventual subject matter: the lives that people who migrate leave behind.

The first source of inspiration was a TED Talk by Anders Fjellberg, a journalist who told the story of the Wetsuitman. When two unidentified skeletons in wetsuits washed up on the coasts of Norway and the Netherlands last year, Anders and his colleague set about finding out about their lives, retracing their journeys from homes far away to their ultimate end in the North Sea. Their painstaking work spanning several countries revealed life stories that we aren’t used to hearing – those of two Syrian refugees who left livelihoods and loving families behind. Their aim? To show that behind every human body, every statistic, every newspaper representation, is a person with a story.

The second source of inspiration came as a result of the recent gun attack by a couple in San Bernadino in the US. After the attack, the couple’s apartment was opened up to journalists, leading to numerous images appearing in the media alongside speculation about what their household objects meant. In an effort to oppose the generalising assumptions that people were making, however, #MuslimApartment began trending on social media. People posted photographs of innocent, everyday objects in their own apartments, alongside sarcastic captions suggesting what underlying terrorist motives they revealed.

In how this trend reclaimed the humanity of Muslim immigrants through everyday home objects, it made me consider how a similar detective exercise in a ‘normal’ household environment could be a powerful method of telling the less spectacular, but nonetheless significant, stories of those who migrate that we rarely see documented.

Joining together these various trains of thought, I designed an exploration experience in which visitors would investigate replicas of rooms from the former homes of migrants. These would be built and arranged according to the migrants' own stories, recorded during participatory workshops with migrant communities.

Entitled ‘Another Life: Exploring the untold stories of migrant lives’, the opening panel of my exhibition gives an overview of this idea:

When people leave home to migrate, they often leave behind stories of a life and a livelihood that rarely get told in their new setting. Instead, we are used to hearing about ‘migrants’ in the context of statistics and government policy. While these wider concerns are important, they don’t teach us much about the people who migrate: fellow human beings with family lives, hobbies, possessions, ambitions, and memories. By learning about these details, we can begin to understand their experiences better and shed new light on issues around migration today, whilst also recognising both the diversity of our cultures and our common humanity.

In this exhibition, we are giving you the opportunity to play detective. By exploring the former homes of real people who have migrated, we want you to find out about their lives. What were their jobs? What did their home town used to be like? Why did they leave? These are just some of the questions you can consider as you investigate.

There are three homes to explore, each representing a different migrant community.  Inside the rooms, you will find all sorts of everyday objects, placed as they would have been in the original homes. You are welcome to touch, pick up, open and use objects in the rooms, but when you are finished please leave everything in the rooms as you found it. We also encourage you to use the tables and chairs provided to talk with others about what you discover.

We hope that your investigations give you insight into the intriguing hidden stories of people who live around us today in our villages, towns, and cities, yet have left another life behind.

 

So in total there would be three replica rooms, each representing a different migrant community participating in the workshops. For each of these communities, one person’s life story would be chosen as the main narrative, while all participants would be involved in decorating the rooms in a culturally-sensitive way, according to their own experiences. The individual life stories would be communicated through objects that contain a more explicit sense of narrative. This could be letters, electronic communications, diary extracts, and notes. As the rooms are replicas, however, all the materials would be created or bought during the production stage – unless participants would be willing to use relevant personal items that are still in their possession.

This image indicates what the rough size of the replica rooms would be, and the type of contents they would contain:

Source: http://norecipes.com/foodbuzz-24-24-24-no-menus-an-underground-restaurant-affair

                                                                      

For the purposes of this exercise, we were given unlimited access to resources for the exhibition, and freedom to choose where the exhibition would be held – providing that it was roughly ‘medium-sized’.

I decided that my exhibition would be held in the Contemporary Gallery of the Geffrye Museum of the Home in London. Not only would this location provide ample space and accessibility for all of the exhibition’s activities, but the subject of ‘home’ – and all of the material and emotional connotations that this word has – is central to the exhibition’s theme.

Here is my floor plan for the exhibition:

As you can see, my exhibition also has an area with tables and chairs provided for discussion between visitors. The idea here is that people can discuss any issues raised by the installation’s subject matter in a space free from the biases and generalisations of the media, instead being informed by the migrants' experiences themselves.

Additionally there are rooms where educational activities for younger visitors could take place. Outreach is an important component of the exhibition, and what better way for young people to learn about other cultures and migrant experiences than by immersing themselves in the everyday environments of these people.

Although it wouldn’t be part of the physical exhibition, another important component of outreach would be a parallel website, where anyone who has experienced migration anywhere in the world could tell their story through text, images, video and sound. Ideally, these stories could be accessed via an interactive map, so that navigating to certain locations on the map would bring up the stories of people who have migrated both from and to the area. This idea arose mainly from my surprise that there is no real substantial online ‘archive’ where migrant experiences are documented, with most stories simply being told through individual media outputs. By creating a website dedicated to preserving these stories, it would help build a legacy for my exhibition project, extending its impact both beyond the timespan of the exhibition run and also beyond the location of the exhibition in London, for those who cannot visit it in person.

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Another Life is an ambitious project, going well beyond the conventions and expectations of most exhibitions. It would therefore be difficult to organise if this were a real proposal, with a limited budget and other institutional and practical hurdles to negotiate. However, as my lecturer told my classmates and I, it’s a shame that there isn’t the opportunity for all of our exhibitions to be made. Between us there were some truly exciting and thought-provoking designs.

This is still an idea that I would love to pursue, though, and if the right opportunity arose it would be interesting to consider how I could develop this concept in a real-life context.

Regardless, designing an exhibition was a really worthwhile experience, and a fantastic chance to combine my geographical interests with my more creative impulses.

Some thoughts on... Twin Peaks and the Detective Mystery Genre

 

 

After finishing university and the long, arduous slog of exam term back in June, I set my mind on spending time doing things I’d been itching to do in those daydreaming moments during revision, when freedom is the singular shining beacon on a mountain of books, papers and deadlines.

Specifically, ART: experiencing, enjoying and making.

Where does Twin Peaks come into this? Well, the series had been on my mind for a long time because so much art that I already loved was littered with references to it. To name but a few:

• Bastille’s Dan Smith is a self-confessed lover of the programme, whose song ‘Laura Palmer’ directly addresses the character of the same name from Twin Peaks.

• Musician Amanda Palmer is another fan, whose album ‘Who Killed Amanda Palmer’ is a tongue-in-cheek reference to the mystery around which the series revolves.

• The makers of the ongoing episodic game, Life is Strange, are huge fans. Not only is their game set in an idyllic Washington state, small town environment comparable to the fictional town of Twin Peaks, but the game’s mystery-centred storyline draws on many of the themes from the TV series.

• Other mystery adventure games such as Alan Wake contain numerous resemblances to Twin Peaks in their storylines, setting and aesthetic.

On this evidence, I simply couldn’t shake the feeling that I was missing out on a sort of cultural lynchpin by not watching Twin Peaks. I had to watch it, and for once I actually had the time to do so.

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About Twin Peaks

Twin Peaks is an American TV mystery drama programme produced by Mark Frost and David Lynch, spanning two series which aired in 1990 and 1991. In total, the two series consisted of 30 episodes. Following the TV series, a feature film called Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, which acts both as a prologue and epilogue to the TV series, was released in 1992, also directed by David Lynch.

In 2014, it was confirmed by Lynch that a third series would be produced, set 25 years after the events in the original two series. It is expected to air in 2016 or 2017, and announcements continue to be made of members of the former 1990s cast and production team that are returning for the new series.

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Mysteries and me 

I started watching Twin Peaks around the middle of June, and finished at the end of August. This timing was fitting, because it happened to coincide with me enjoying numerous other examples of detective mystery fiction. After all, Twin Peaks wasn’t the only thing I was going to spend my newly-found freedom on!

During this period I also:

-       Continued to play ‘Life is Strange’.

-       Played ‘The Vanishing of Ethan Carter’.

-       Played ‘Her Story’.

-       Played ‘Homesick’.

-       Watched playthroughs of two Sherlock Holmes games.

-       Watched a number of detective mystery programmes on TV, including New Tricks, Midsomer Murders, Sherlock and Jonathan Creek.

-       Watched the film Shutter Island.

-       Read ‘Digital Fortress’ by Dan Brown.

I think it’s fair to say that I’ve had quite a decent exposure to detective mystery fiction over this period.

And given my desire to start thinking more artistically again after the mind-numbing experience of intense revision and exams, the combination of Twin Peaks and these examples began to make me think about what the figure of the ‘detective’ and the detective genre in general represent, and what they mean to me personally.

Detective, crime and mystery fiction have been ever-present in my life for almost as long as I can remember. It’s probably quite unusual for parents to let their kids stay up and watch adult murder mystery TV shows when they’re still only halfway through primary school, but that’s what my Mum did. Programmes like Midsomer Murders, Jonathan Creek, Poirot, Miss Marple and A Touch of Frost became staples in our family, and I loved it. Mysteries intrigued me.

I think that to me mysteries were (and still are) almost more than stories, because in addition to describing a sequence of events mysteries give you the opportunity to question the reasons or motives behind, and the consequences of, these events. Through the medium of the detective, they allow you to piece together each flicker of thought, feeling and action and use them to shine light on a bigger picture. You can delve into the details and the nitty-gritty, knowing that even something small and seemingly insignificant could tip the balance of understanding.

The distinguishing factor is curiosity. Mysteries provide us with questions, and our engagement with the story is typically built upon our curiosity to know the answers to these questions.

While curiosity in everyday life may be construed as nosiness and lack of respect for privacy, I think that the great thing about mystery stories is how they encourage us to experience the thrill of searching for hidden meaning, deciphering clues and solving problems, without the same social and physical boundaries we would experience in real life. With our newly-found access to people’s lives – their secrets, their relationships with others, what they do, where and when – we become glued to the edge of our seats by the anticipation that each snippet of information brings us a step closer to answering the questions posed at the beginning.

As a result I find that mystery stories also tend to be very satisfying as well as thrilling, because when the pieces of the jigsaw finally fall into place and a story arc is revealed, you get a sense of fulfilment from having your questions answered. I think about the classic scenes used by Agatha Christie, where the detective gathers all of the characters in one room and systematically re-tells the sequence of events, this time filling in the gaps with facts established during the investigation. It is a catharsis, where tensions are abruptly and dramatically released, like a ‘drop’ in music. You can see why this technique was so effective. You have the satisfaction of resolution and the drama of revelation clutching each other at the climax.

However, at the end of the story it isn’t always as clear cut as the ‘bad guy goes to jail’, ‘crime doesn’t pay’ refrain. As well as providing a further sense of resolution or satisfaction to the story, justice in mystery dramas is a theme that allows you to consider the boundaries between right and wrong, in a genre where it is nearly always a crime that is the source of mystery. It is interesting to consider how morality should operate, for example, when mental illness is involved, or a long time has passed since the crime was committed. It adds another layer of meaning that goes beyond the confines of the story’s events, and is thought-provoking in that it allows you to consider your own moral inclinations.

Overall, then, I would say that my long-standing affinity for detective mysteries is largely built on three pillars:

·         Curiosity: the exciting process of learning and interpreting information about people and events.

·         Resolution: the satisfaction of having your questions answered, and sometimes justice.

·         Morality: questions of what is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ and their wider significance.

 

What Twin Peaks changed

Before I began watching Twin Peaks, the main thing I’d heard about it was that the whole show (30 episodes and a film) hinged on the murder of one person - Laura Palmer.

This interested me. In a genre where the mystery tends to be solved in the episode in which it is introduced – or at least within two or three – I wondered how the programme managed to sustain people’s curiosity for so long. Without the satisfaction of having your questions answered, where was the sense of resolution?

Simply put: how did the producers managed to drag the whole thing out so long?!

But this fact turns out to be the genius of Twin Peaks, and why it completely altered my perception of what detective/mystery stories are.

In Twin Peaks, like in real life, drama doesn’t unfold neatly and resolve itself quickly and unproblematically, or confine itself to those directly involved in extraordinary events. From the very first episode, Laura Palmer’s murder is the gateway through which the viewer is sucked into the messy lives of ordinary people, in a small town where everybody knows everybody else. Because even in an idyllic, semi-rural, middle-class environment that appears pristine on the outside, people have secrets. People have dark and ambiguous histories. People tell lies. Equally, those who may appear bad or heartless on the surface harbour a lighter, sensitive side. And although serious crime is undoubtedly an extraordinary event, Twin Peaks departs from the archetypal mystery story by focusing on the drama, intrigue and downright strangeness that exists in the everyday, not just the extraordinary.

Curiosity, resolution and morality take on a meaning of their own in Twin Peaks, beyond the characteristic ‘criminal investigation’ storylines.

David Lynch’s brilliance as a director and producer shines through in two important techniques he uses to achieve this.

The first thing to note is a particular method of character development that Lynch uses, involving stereotypes. On first impressions, you begin to get a sense of what some of the main characters might be like. You have Sheriff Harry Truman, the law-abiding, no-nonsense cop. There’s Bobby Briggs, the typical macho high-school jock who loves to cause trouble. Leo Johnson, violent partner to Shelly Johnson, who is too afraid to confront Leo’s domestic abuse. Ben Horne, the rich local businessman who wants to own as much of Twin Peaks as possible. These are just a few examples of Twin Peaks characters that appear to fit quite neatly into the stereotypical roles of American small-town suburbia.

In traditional detective mysteries the characters largely stay within the boundaries of their given roles, apart from the murderer who is suddenly seen to be hiding a dark secret, and perhaps one or two red herrings to arouse your suspicions.

This is not the case in Twin Peaks.

Because as soon as you start to think you understand each character, Lynch abruptly uncovers a different side to their personality, pushing them beyond the limits of their stereotypes. All of a sudden you begin to question their actions and motives, realising that behind every curtain and batted eyelid are mysterious forces at work.

It soon becomes clear that Laura Palmer’s murder is certainly not the only mystery in Twin Peaks. Rather, every single person is a mystery.

No one is completely ‘good’ or ‘bad’, ‘normal’ or ‘strange’. In fact, no one is ‘completely’ anything.

And so we can see that in Twin Peaks, unlike your average detective mystery story, you don’t need extraordinary or shocking events to pique your curiosity, or question human morality. There is no simple resolution to people’s problems, where everything goes back to normal.

People’s everyday lives provide enough intrigue by themselves.

Which brings me onto the second of Lynch’s techniques that I wanted to talk about, involving the use of surrealism.

In another point of departure from your typical TV detective mystery, many of the goings-on in Twin Peaks do not appear to be ‘of this world’. At times, the series could justifiably be described as a ‘psychological horror’ or ‘supernatural drama’. Meaningful dreams and visions, multiple personalities, alternate dimensions and a variety of unusual mental disorders are just a few examples of this.

What interests me most about this element of the series, though, is how the surreal blurs into the mundane. The unusual and supernatural are a part of everyday life - slotting seamlessly into day-to-day occurrences – rather than just being the outcome of extraordinary events.

This is quite deftly symbolised by the cooperation of the two main ‘detective’ characters in the series. One is the spiritual, instinctive Special Agent Dale Cooper, an FBI agent sent to Twin Peaks to investigate the Laura Palmer case. The other is the practical, rational Sheriff Truman. In many ways they couldn’t be more different in their way of thinking or methods, and yet when combined they manage to strike a strong partnership as they attempt to get to the bottom of the mysteries that unfold.

The end result of this intertwining of the mundane and the surreal is that there is always an atmosphere or presence of mystery in Twin Peaks, rather than simply a sequence of mysterious occurrences. Every day is extraordinary, dramatic and worthy of our curiosity. And even when some of our questions are answered, there’s no ‘happy ever after’ where everything returns to normal – just like the ongoing drama that is real life.

That to me is the real beauty of Twin Peaks. Unlike any other detective mystery I’ve come across, it actively encourages us to appreciate the extraordinary in the everyday; the mystery and strangeness that is day-to-day life.

 

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My 5 favourite things about Twin Peaks

The soundtrack: Angelo Badalamenti’s music is hauntingly beautiful; the perfect accompaniment to the series. Was thrilled to hear that he is composing the score for the forthcoming series.

The quirkiness: I love the quirky habits and traits that each character has, which make for some very funny and strange scenes throughout the series.

The setting: I like the sense of place that you develop as you watch the series. You really begin to feel as if you ‘know’ Twin Peaks almost as well as the fictional characters who live there, each location with its own meanings and memories.

My favourite characters: the melodramatic Donna, the slow-minded but lovable Andy, the insightful ‘Log Lady’ and the tantalising Audrey.

Agent Cooper’s recorded monologues: a brilliant plot device that gives you access to the detective’s thoughts and observations, but also add to the mystery of the series. Who is the ‘Diane’ to which he always addresses his messages?

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Final thoughts

I’m really, really glad I decided to watch Twin Peaks this summer.

Since watching the series, I’ve realised that the qualities that I typically like in detective mysteries are all there. There is plenty to be curious about in the lives of each character. You do get some sense of resolution when truths are uncovered, even if they are almost immediately replaced by new questions. And there is more than enough to take from the series on the nature of human morality.

The feature that makes Twin Peaks stand out, however, is the way that these qualities materialise.

In its attention to the intrigue of everyday life, the simple pleasure of the traditional detective mystery story is somehow imbued with a whole new level of meaning. Twin Peaks becomes so much more than just a TV mystery drama because it provides significant insight into real life too: into the inescapable mystery and strangeness of people living seemingly ‘ordinary’ lives.

I think the idea in many ways is simple, but it was executed in Twin Peaks so well that it became revolutionary in the detective mystery genre.

I have actually just finished watching series 1 of ITV’s Broadchurch, which I didn’t have time to watch when it was originally shown because – you guessed it – I had a ton of university work. The series has won several BAFTAs, and can you guess which TV show its writer, Chris Chibnall, cites as a major influence?

Yep, it’s Twin Peaks.

And there are quite a few blatant similarities, not least the fact that the series focuses on the everyday lives of people in an ordinary small town, which has been shocked by one sudden murder.

And Twin Peaks will continue to be an inspiration for detective mysteries of all types for years to come, because its approach and its ideas resonate with people.

This is what has motivated me to start planning some conceptual art based on the figure of the ‘detective’ and the notion of ‘mystery’ which, as you can gather, I’ve been thinking about a lot recently.

There are also plenty of connections to my academic interest in psychogeography. As a practice, pscyhogeography is always looking to find intrigue and excitement in the mundane environments of everyday life. The theme of the 'extraordinary in the everyday', as well as the novel technique of surrealism as a way of depicting this in film, have given me lots to think about in terms of how we might visualise the little stories and dramas that take place and produce meaning in the ordinary environments we inhabit.                                                                                                                 

I’m now eagerly looking forward to seeing what new insights the third series brings, and enjoying the fantastic art that Twin Peaks will continue to inspire.

 

(Note: The image in this post was obtained from http://assets.rollingstone.com/assets/2014/article/twin-peaks-to-return-to-tv-in-2016-20141006/170592/large_rect/1412612141/1401x788-Screen%20Shot%202014-10-06%20at%2012.14.53%20PM.png)