An Interview with Meg Jayanth
80 Days, the future of Cyberpunk, crafting mobile game narratives and the Android:Netrunner universe.
I recently wrote this article for VICE vs. Video Games about Meg Jayanth’s narrative work on 80 Days, and also the first game adaption of the Android: Netrunner universe. Of course there wasn’t space for much of the wisdom and insight Meg answered my questions with, so here they are in the entirety.
How did you get involved with 80 Days/Inkle and what was the writing process like?
Jon and Joe (the co-founders of inkle Studios) approached me to do a writing sample for 80 Days after they’d seen my previous game, Samsara — a Storynexus game of courtly intrigue and dreamwalking set in 18th century Bengal. They were looking for someone who could handle a game that required a mix of heavily researched history and fantasy, and I think they saw that in Samsara.
I started writing the game a few months before development started — so a lot of the research and worldbuilding and narrative fed into the development process. Jon wrote about a third of the game — and so it was really wonderful to collaborate, go back and forth, and bounce off each other’s ideas. Really it was a very organic and fluid process, not at all bound to flowcharts or chronologies.
What, for you, are the most important things to remember when crafting a narrative? When crafting a mobile narrative?
That’s a broad question. I think it’s really important to consider the purpose and context when crafting a narrative. Why are you writing this particular story in this particular way? Writing for mobile or digital is a matter of respecting the context of reading or play. inkle are masters at this — they make beautifully designed, approachable, and slick games. Making a story like this pleasurable to read and play on a mobile device ora computer screen is a huge part of our game’s success — I learned a huge amount about structure, pace and succinctness from working with inkle.
“The film that most defines cyberpunk for me is Strange Days — it’s pleasingly weird and dizzying and just a little bit glamorously gruesome”
What does cyberpunk mean to you? What are your biggest influences?
I’ve always been a science fiction nerd — I started on the classics — Asimov, Frank Herbert — the big space operas and the grand visions of the future. And I love those, don’t get me wrong — but discovering cyberpunk was like a revelation. It’s like the difference between Star Trek: The Next Generation and Battlestar Galactica. Suddenly I found characters who were less than perfect, less than admirable — maybe not humanity’s best and brightest, but trying to make their way in worlds that were broken. Broken but human.
I could recognise the people in cyberpunk — I feel like as a genre it never forgot that no matter the advances in nanotech and artificial intelligence, and no matter whether societies are governed by megacorporations instead of nation-states, people are people. Greedy, wonderful, silly, difficult, and everything in between. I love that cyberpunk is usually about the person on the street rather than the head of the megacorporation, and your sympathies are engaged with the misfits and dissenters rather than with institutions. It’s so wonderfully infused with politics at the individual, human level.
Everyone names Neuromancer as an influence and I’m no different, though Idoru’s my favourite Gibson novel. Anything by Philip K Dick, Vernor Vinge, Pat Cadigan. Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man. River of Gods by Ian McDonald takes cyberpunk into India, as does The Beast With Nine Billion Feet by Anil Menon — which plays with a world on the cusp of a transhuman revolution. And of course, I love Ghost in the Shell.
I’ll probably lose cool points for saying that I think the Jessica Alba tv show Dark Angel is one of my favourites too — it’s slangy and irreverent and not afraid to remake the world — oh and hey, contains at least a few people of colour. And the film that most defines cyberpunk for me is Strange Days — it’s pleasingly weird and dizzying and just a little bit glamorously gruesome — which all the best cyberpunk is, a little. Does Dark City count as cyberpunk?
I’m deeply aware that my list of influences is really male and really white. There are so many authors and works on my list to expand my frame of references, going into working in the Android universe.
What attracts you to writing for/working on mobile games? What are their unique possibilities?
I don’t know that I’m particularly attracted to writing for mobile as opposed to any other medium. But it seems to me that there’s a lot of innovation and risk-taking happening on mobile. It’s possible to carve out a successful niche, to talk about subjects and make games outside of the narrow range of AAA console blockbusters, which by necessity have to be aimed at the broadest possible market. I’m attracted to projects I think have artistic merit, that are doing something interesting, and it seems like a lot of those happen to be mobile-focused at the moment!
Broadly speaking, what are your ambitions for the future? (ideal projects, how would you like to see the industry change, personal development?)
I’d love to keep working — it’s a good time to be a writer in the games industry, I think. Better than it has been anyway — with more discussion about narratives in games, and so much creativity going on in Twine and indie games that’s starting to trickle into the mainstream. More broadly of course I’d love to see the industry becoming more diverse and inclusive and multifarious — both in terms of what it produces and the people doing the producing. I think things are changing, I hope they are, but the pace of change seems frustratingly slow sometimes.
The original Android is obviously influenced by Bladerunner, like so much. Why do you think Blade Runner was so insanely influential and how can we move on?
Bladerunner is influential because it’s so unexpected — in terms of its visuals, its complexity, the way it draws on a vision of the future that isn’t purely white and Western — at least in terms of set design. Despite how visionary all of this is — the main characters are all white, despite the supposedly multicultural cyberpunk Los Angeles that they live in. (Android does so much better on this front — which is one of the most exciting things, for me.) But there’s a lot to learn from Bladerunner — it’s darkness, it’s complexity, how it synthesises and amalgamates cultural influences without necessarily replicating them.
It’s a smart film, and it trusts its audiences to be smart. I like how much remains unsaid — between the various characters, and between the film and the audience. I think that’s why it remains a classic — because it doesn’t pretend to have all the answers to those big themes — what is humanity? what is empathy? what is the nature of truth in an increasingly mediated, synthetic world? — it’s a conversation with the audience.
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