PORT/TOWN

PORT/TOWN.

Synopsis

April 27th, 1999. Political scientist and text adventure game designer, St. Beatrice Overresch, along with her student, R.C. Noh, have disappeared from Leipzig University. The editor of her work, Simon Pachmann, and Overresch’s husband, K., travel to Leipzig to investigate a possible connection between her disappearance and her work on the nature of political conviction. But Pachmann comes to believe that her disappearance may have more to do with her work on her final game, “Port Town”. It becomes clear that, before she vanished, Overresch foresaw a terrible tragedy, a tragedy she was unable to prevent, and that her game might be the key to unlocking what happened, both to her and to her missing protégé.

About the novel

After living and working in Leipzig for two years, I started work on a novel about a fictional academic, her work as a video-game designer and her embroilment in local politics in the city. I decided to tell the story in the form of an “annotated edition” to the last text game she published before her disappearance: PORT/TOWN. Inspired by text adventure games from the 1980s and 1990s, choose-your-own-adventure books, and attempts to archive and reproduce such games in print for academic study, I wanted to weave together the fictional world of the game – a hunt for missing objects in an Italianate seaside town riven by factionalism – and the “real” world of Leipzig in 1999.

The novel is set a year after an infamous demonstration at the Monument to the Battle of Nations in which a coalition of radical right demonstrators gathered and violence broke out between them, counter demonstrators on the left and the police. In so far as the story is told through the eyes of an American academic with only a superficial knowledge of German politics, his observations are somewhat superficial and, occasionally, border on the hysterical. However, over the course of the novel, he does come to realise that his friend and colleague is unlikely to have been harmed by either faction, and begins to suspect, instead, a radical libertarian internet movement associated with Overresch’s former employer.

Research

Having written a first draft, I am currently conducting additional archive and in-person research in Leipzig and Saxony into German politics in the 1990s, in particular the events of 1st May 1999. My research questions include: what changed between 1998 and 1999 which meant that the violent clash between demonstrators and counter-demonstrators in 1998 did not repeat itself the following year? How did the tactics of the right-wing demonstrators from, for example, the NPD, differ from those of the previous year? How did the tactics of left wing counter-demonstrators develop? How did the state respond? How were these events reported by the media?

I am also interested in how events in Leipzig were reported internationally, to what extent Leipzig was perceived as “preserving” or “continuing” certain conflicts, for instance, between left and right wing movements which were perceived by academics and the media, rightly or wrongly, elsewhere in Germany as well as in the United States to have been “resolved”. What is omitted in international coverage of political unrest in Leipzig?

My research into text adventure games and game design in the 1990s is also ongoing. I am interested in how writers of text adventures and interactive fiction continued to work in the medium even after the commercial decline of companies such as Infocom. I am also interested in how such games were perceived politically. Did they fall under the same suspicion as “video-games” as promoting violence, political ambivalence and a retreat from reality? Did the real-life creators of these games have socio-politial motivations for creating their adventures or interactive fictions?