Profile Feature: Simon Spurrier – Mind Crawler

A few months back writer Simon Spurrier (X-Men Legacy, Number Cruncher) was kind enough to give me an interview for a profile feature I planned to write about him and his work. Unfortunately, I was unsuccessful in pitching it around, but it seems like a tremendous waste to let it rot in my archives. Especially considering how gracious Spurrier was in giving me the interview and about the whole exercise in general.

So anyway, here is the feature I wrote based off our interview. For those interested I will also post the interview itself in a Q&A form at a later date so you can see his thoughts on some things I don’t mention in the feature. Enjoy.

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X-Men Legacy #4

Simon Spurrier writes comics. He writes comics about lots of things. He writes about six-gun toting talking gorillas and planets that are shaped by the human psyche. He writes about quantum mathematics and abstract fractal ferns, about space faring men of silver, host to the power cosmic, and about perfectly normal men in equally bizarre situations. He’s even been known to write about a little thing called love.  Simon Spurrier is a storyteller – and he wants to control your mind.

“If I’m right, and story is a critical and completely core part of the human experience, then telling stories is tantamount to being an extremely good manipulator – an extremely powerful controller of minds and controller of people,” says Spurrier. He then alludes to Alan Moore’s thoughts about storytelling – idea-space and magic, and how the three are intrinsically linked. It’s a mental check to measure his own feelings against. “He’s not wrong. I wouldn’t put it in such frilly terms, but to tell a story which changes the way in which somebody thinks, or to change the way in which somebody digests information is essentially to fiddle with people’s minds. That’s quite a seductive thing to be able to do.”

He laughs heartily as he relays this – machinations of mischief implied by his tone. The question is why he writes, what it is about stories that makes him want to communicate them to others. In answering, he seems genuinely unsure, as if he’s never been asked the question before – which he has. “I was asked by someone recently, ‘Why do you write?’” He reflects, conjuring the scene in his peripheral memory – “and the first thing that came to my mind was not ‘why do you write?’ but it suddenly occurred to me that I can’t think of any writer who’s ever stopped writing. So don’t ask me where the imperative begins, I don’t know, but I feel as if once you’ve started you can’t stop.”

Spurrier, 32, has been writing comics for a little over a decade. He cut his teeth at British publication 2000AD, penning stories for Tharg’s Future Shocks and Judge Dredd, among others. He speaks about this early period with the sort of wry, self-deprecating humour you might expect from a writer, but at the same time there is a definite nostalgia present as he recalls certain events, especially his many failings early on: “The best rejection letter I got was from then editor, David Bishop. This was after years of submitting an idea every couple of months, and the letter just says ‘no, no, no, no, no, no – no.’” He associates this letter with a turning point in his life – a point where he finally began to accept critical feedback and used it to, by his own admission, become a better storyteller. Not long after this revelatory moment is when his work at 2000AD began, and would continue for many years.

Silver Surfer: In Thy Name #2

From around 2006-07 he began to branch out, publishing work through big names like Image and Marvel. Yet still he remained just below the mainstream radar, like some contrary stealth jet – dropping strange and evocative thought bombs like Silver Surfer: In Thy Name and Gutsville sporadically over the years, a trend that continued until 2012 when he took on regular writing duties for X-Men Legacy at industry titan, Marvel comics, home of the superhero – a strange gig considering his conflicted thoughts on cape comics: “At its best it can be really aspirational and transformative and good. At its worst it can be an absolutely lazy attempt to define the world in terms of binary morality.” The mainstream, where the same superhero stories are told time and again, nothing ever really changes and the work is dictated by the idea of the ‘predictable sale’. It is the last place you’d expect to find Simon Spurrier. The very notion of a story without an ending aggravates him. “I dislike stories when they don’t end, that’s not a story as far as I’m concerned”. The topic gets him a little riled, but he fights to express his reasoning in a clear way. “If you accept that the story is… if it’s a way of making information digestible, then in order for it to be a unit, in order for it to be a package of information, our brains automatically want it to have an ending”.

Once again channelling that contrary jet Spurrier has found a way to avoid the pitfalls of mainstream comic writing, telling an intricate, emotional and well-structured story in X-Men Legacy. His work on the book is drawing to a close and, while he speaks fondly of his time writing it, he laments that his brand of thoughtful, modular storytelling has yet to garner as much of an audience as some of the bigger name comics out there. However, he remains hopeful. He senses a change in the way mainstream publishers work, and he certainly wants to be a part of it. “They are waking up to the fact that there are styles beyond their historical house style. They’re awakening to so many things”, he says thoughtfully.

X-Men Legacy has inarguably been a critical success that defied all expectations, but Spurrier is ready to put it to bed. The story needs to end and he’s already excited about his upcoming work on X-Force. “It’s an interesting set of parameters and it’s a good opportunity to do some important allegorical stuff, real world stuff,” he says with an un-disguisable enthusiasm. X-Force, being a book about clandestine covert operations, gives Spurrier the rare opportunity to tell a very topical story in the comic medium, and he can’t wait.

X-Force #1

Even reflecting on this ever-growing body of work, he struggles to tell me why he writes, why he has left this distinct and creative footprint on the industry. He pokes and prods at the issue with suggestive insight but can’t quite commit to an answer: “My suspicion is, if you characterise yourself as a writer and you’re literally the last person in the world, so there’s nobody to read your writing, would you still write? My guess is probably not. I suspect that there is an element of, forgivable but very, very clear narcissism involved in the imperative to write.” Perhaps it is simply a matter of ego, a desire to be heard, but something in the way he talks about storytelling makes me suspect otherwise. It’s the way he separates writing, and hence himself from what it is to tell a story.

“Story is a component of life,” he says. “Our very peculiar human way of perceiving the information of the world is to generate narratives. And so it happens every time you have a conversation, every time you paint a picture, every time you play a piece of music. Writing is just one element, probably the best known element but it’s just one element of what it is to live with, experience and generate stories.”

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Thanks again to Simon for the interview, check him out on twitter @sispurrier

Watch this space for the Q&A.

The Banner Saga Review: The Beautiful Struggle

PLATFORM: Windows – PC ¦ DEVELOPER: Stoic ¦ PUBLISHER: Versus Evil

RELEASE DATE: 14/1/2014

Time is the enemy. Fighting time is as futile as fighting air – you cannot win, so why try? The Banner Saga is a fight against time, and sure enough I constantly felt like I was losing. So why did I keep trying? Perhaps it was my innate distaste of fatalism, or perhaps it was simply that losing has never looked so beautiful.

Created by new developer Stoic, The Banner Saga displays a level of visual polish to be revered by indie and mainstream developers alike. This is impressive but not entirely surprising, as while Stoic is a young studio, it is a studio made up of experienced pros, the likes of which have worked for titans such as Bioware, Retro Studios and…NASA?

As would be expected from a team with such an impressive résumé, the world of The Banner Saga is artistically very well realised. It is gorgeous, and the world is dripping with rich, genuinely interesting lore.

Set in an unforgiving snow scape, inhabited by nomadic Vikings, immortal giants called Varl and shambling monstrosities known as Dredge, the story of The Banner Saga is understandably bleak. The main goal is to lead a caravan of warriors and clansmen to safe refuge – managing resources to avoid starvation and fatigue, while simultaneously attempting to outmanoeuvre the ever-present threat of the Dredge. Times are hard, and hard decisions must be made to survive. Amidst this strife it is difficult to perceive a happy ending, which is fortunate, because there is no happy ending. The Banner Saga is a game about struggle, death, loss and resource management.

This point is driven home early. Unfortunately, The Banner Saga fails to deliver on the promise of what could have been an interesting exercise in choice based gameplay. Your decisions, which have a direct impact on who lives and dies, never seem to bear the weight of their consequences. As a result it becomes too easy to switch off emotionally. There are several reasons for this, but the most obvious are the seemingly arbitrary text-based decisions you are required to make when guiding the caravan. These often have something to do with rationing supplies or choosing whether or not to face an enemy head on. But on some occasions they can lead to the permanent death of your battle units – outside of battle. In a game about risk management this would usually be acceptable, but the flavour text describing a possible life and death scenario often does not reflect the impact your decision can have. As a result the experience as a whole comes across as random, like a choose-your-own adventure novel – you picked option C, turn to page 37 to die. The way your heroes can be so casually tossed aside in a text prompt makes them feel like an expendable resource – which is no-doubt the point. However, the same can be said of losses to the caravan. Clansmen, fighters and Varl can all die due to a lack of supplies or during confrontations with Dredge, but the only indicator of this ‘tragic loss’ is that a number at the top of the screen changes. Any obligatory guilt felt from a decision that caused deaths fades almost immediately, as there is no real consequence other than a smaller tally of clansmen and a slight blow to morale. The numbers in your caravan ultimately don’t matter – they don’t contribute anything substantial – so why care? In the end the only number that counts is your renown.

Renown is The Banner Saga’s answer to resource management. It acts as a universal currency – used for everything, from buying food and equipment to levelling up your characters. Because of this, there will never be enough to go around. It is impossible to keep everyone fed and at the same time keep your battle units well equipped. This is obviously an attempt by Stoic to add a sense of consequence to your actions. However, when said consequences are so farcical, there is no reason not to sacrifice lives to be better equipped for combat. And you will want to be better equipped for combat.

Time not spent in dialogue windows, or managing your caravan will be spent fighting in tense, deliberately paced encounters. Opposite to the story, which fails to ever establish a sense of weight to your decisions, the combat insists on it from the very beginning. In battle, every decision matters. Careful positioning and attention to the turn order are essential to achieving victory, and the AI won’t hesitate to punish players who don’t consider these factors – even on normal difficulty. To add further challenge, defeating enemies isn’t as simple as reducing an opponent’s health to zero. All units have a health meter, which doubles as their strength, dictating how much damage they can inflict, as well as an armour rating which must first be lowered to do any substantial damage to their health. This makes for some interesting tactical opportunities, as it is necessary to decide whether to go after an enemy’s strength or armour as the situation dictates. Overall there is a more considered mentality in the design of the combat that harkens back to unforgiving strategy games of old. It has a feel of permanence that makes it a far deeper and more gratifying experience than the story.

CONCLUSION

Stoic have created a world with a wonderful sense of tone and place, and it looks absolutely stunning – I just wish I wanted to spend more time in it. The lore and art are both rich and well-conceived. And the combat has a level of depth that once fully comprehended makes for a rewarding diversion from the narrative. However, the story itself lacks finesse. It never made me feel the weight of my decisions, and so I couldn’t help but feel emotionally disconnected – by the end of the game, I just wanted it to be over. For patient gamers, or those that need to scratch the itch that only a strategy game can, there is something here – a beautiful, shaky journey of promise. But for those seeking something more, perhaps this is a Saga better left untold.