You're a Good Man, Charlie Fyfe

Nobody ever heard of my great-grandfather. This is why.

Charles Fyfe was born in 1881, the twelfth child of Scottish immigrants, somewhere in New Zealand. New Zealand, at that time, was recently colonised and represented for many Europeans a kind of idealised ‘new world’ and opportunity for a new life.

Charles – or “Charlie”, as he was called in the title of this blog post – became a student of chemistry. Once he graduated, he opened his own pharmacy. As a pharmacist, he had easy access to opium, his drug of choice, to which he soon found himself addicted. This detail, I think, is nicely evocative of the period. Opium having become obsolete in the course of the 20th century, the drug evokes in the modern imagination clichéd, Jazz Age vogue – opium as a dark companion to the Charleston – before it does serious substance abuse.

Charles, we can infer, wasn’t discreet about his vice. He was arrested multiple times on drug charges and occasionally imprisoned. But what Charles lacked in discretion, he made up for in jailbreaking: being, God knows how, able to escape from prison repeatedly.

In the few free moments afforded Charles by his preoccupying interests in opium and being jailed, he entertained the company of several young women. One of those women, Alice Montgomery, bore him a son: my grandfather. Upon the birth of his child, Charles decided he wasn’t really feeling it. He fled the country, quickly, and moved to Australia, leaving his girlfriends and son behind.

In Australia, Charles didn’t do much. He continued his opium use, of course, in his new capacity as a full-time vagrant. On one occasion, the police found Charles comatose against the wall of a barn, and released him out of sympathy when he claimed to be a veteran of the First World War whose mind had been addled by the horrors of trench warfare. Charles, naturally, never fought in World War I – the “Great War”, as it would have been called then, or, as Charles referred to it, “that war I definitely fought in.” A free man, Charles drifted around for several more years in this fashion until he was hit by a car and died.

My branch of the Fyfe family is not large, and so Charles has a comfortable hold on the title of Worst Fyfe. Until recently, though, when my aunt took an active interest in researching our genealogy, I didn’t know a thing about him. In my family, he is never discussed and deliberately forgotten. When he abandoned his family, his family abandoned him. His descendants, not particularly interested in claiming him, have been content to record his position on the family tree as just a person-shaped ‘citation needed’. Understandably so: you’d prefer to say your ancestor was a guy who built bridges, or even the person who hit Charles Fyfe with his car.

My younger brother is a medical student. He’ll be the first Fyfe since Charles to go into medicine. He prefers not to draw the comparison. The knowledge that Charles Fyfe existed, and was kind of a dick, has always lurked on the periphery of our family history, but nobody has ever wanted to do anything with that information. Until me, that is. I have been more than willing to take ownership of Charles’ troubled biography and assume responsibility for his legacy. I do this for exactly one reason: I’m the first Fyfe since Charles to be a writer, and in the typically eternal and unforgiving words of Joan Didion, writers are always selling somebody out.

Because of the way Charles lived and the way he died, he never received anything like a proper memorial. I don’t know where he’s buried, or if he even is. These words are the first to be written on Charles Fyfe in nearly a century, and the closest thing he’s ever had to an obituary. And can you imagine this being your obituary? Jeepers creepers. For how would Charles Fyfe have felt knowing that one day his story would be told to strangers around the world, but only in order to establish him as a bad person? That isn’t due to any selective editing on my part, I’ll point out. Charles’ story, as I’ve told it above, is literally all anyone knows about him.

As a brief aside, I know even less about Alice Montgomery, my great-grandmother. With Alice, there’s exactly one thing worth noting: in my aunt’s garage, there are many, many cassette tapes of Alice, as a much older woman, holding a séance to channel the ghosts of her dead relatives. What was going on with these people?

Charles, who appears now never to have done anything of value but father a son, died in 1945. He passed on under the tyres of car and passed into the next life – the next life, in which he ceases to be a human being, cedes control of his legacy and takes on relevance for the living as precisely one thing: subject matter.

Charles Fyfe is not a person, now, but material – material that, in the telling, serves the author as much as the subject, material that I’ve decided belongs to me. Charles Fyfe belongs to me. And so that is how Charles Fyfe’s story ends. Sold out by his great-grandson. Introduced to the world as a bad guy. What’s worse is that he had to wait until now for anybody to say anything about him. He had to wait that long before anybody cared about him enough to do so.

In Charles Fyfe’s wildest dreams, in the numbest of his reveries or as he bled out on the road, I wonder, very selfishly, what he would have thought about all this. I’m not really proud to think like that, nor to conclude this essay on my great-grandfather without mention of forgiveness or compassion or redemption, any of which would be conventionally appropriate at this juncture. Yet here we are. Here we are, Charles: I’m not that selfless either. Which makes sense, I suppose: after all, we are family.

Look what you did. You were born into the new world. And look what happened.

Mystery House Always Wins

It is getting dark.

I am standing in the foyer of a large Victorian house. This is the Mystery House. Having let myself in through the front door I am now faced with seven people all standing in a row, neither moving nor talking, and each one looking at me with the same unblinking, lifeless eyes. And it is getting dark.

I try to leave through a nearby doorway. I DON'T UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU MEAN, protests the Mystery House, then adds, IT IS GETTING DARK. I clarify: type the words 'go door'. I look around in the next room. THERE IS NOTHING SPECIAL. IT IS GETTING DARK. I continue to explore the house in this fashion. The seven people have now vanished. IT IS GETTING DARK. In the kitchen, I find a book of matches. IT IS GETTING DARK. I leave the kitchen. I DON'T UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU MEAN. I go door. IT IS GETTING DARK. Upstairs, I enter a nursery and find one of the seven, on the floor, dead. IT IS GETTING DARK. IT IS DARK, YOU CAN'T SEE. I light a match, and look at the body. I DON'T KNOW HOW TO LOOK. I leave. THE MATCH WENT OUT. I light another match and keep looking around. THE MATCH WENT OUT. IT IS DARK, YOU CAN'T SEE. I light another match. I explore the west hallway. I CAN'T GO IN THAT DIRECTION. THE MATCH WENT OUT. IT IS DARK, YOU CAN'T SEE. I light another match. I head downstairs. I DON'T UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU MEAN. I go stairs. THE MATCH WENT OUT. IT IS DARK, YOU CAN'T SEE. I light another match. I head to the back yard, where I stumble upon a second body. THE MATCH WENT OUT. IT IS DARK, YOU CAN'T SEE. I light another match and attempt to examine the victim. I DON'T UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU MEAN. THE MATCH WENT OUT. IT IS DARK, YOU CAN'T SEE. I light another match and walk to another door into the house. THIS DOOR IS CLOSED. I open the door and go door. THE MATCH WENT OUT. IT IS DARK, YOU CAN'T SEE. I light another match. In this dining room there is a candle on the table. THE MATCH WENT OUT. IT IS DARK, YOU CAN'T SEE. I light another match and move to light the candle. YOU DON'T HAVE IT. I take the candle, then, and light it. OK. Breathing a little easier, I head back out into the yard. YOU TRIP OVER RUG AND FALL. OH, OH, YOU STARTED A FIRE WITH YOUR CANDLE! I look at the fire. THE FIRE IS OUT OF CONTROL. YOU ARE DEAD. WOULD YOU LIKE TO PLAY AGAIN

Nobody likes Mystery House.

The common knock on this (very) early adventure game from Sierra On-Line's Ken and Roberta Williams is that while it has a deserved place in video game history, it's plainly not a very enjoyable video game. It certainly was an innovation, though, being the first adventure to feature full, albeit primitive, computer graphics in addition to the usual text. And this is why Mystery House is remembered: for its historical significance, kind of like Birth of a Nation, or polio.

Mystery House is ostensibly a mystery story, one told through crude line art, constrained prose and a barely functional text parser. The premise is that of these seven - guests? residents? - one is killing off the others, and possibly the player too, in an effort to claim some 'jewels' rumoured to be hidden in the house.

This mystery is not, as Poirot would say, "all that." The killer dumps all of the bodies out in the open, for the player to not so much 'discover' as inevitably happen upon in the general course of being alive. And as to which of the seven is the culprit - a creative choice that is basically arbitrary - the murderer kills the other suspects within minutes of the game commencing, which takes a lot of the guesswork out of this case. The puzzles in this game, such as they are, have nothing to do with solving murders. The player is just present in the house while murders occur as a matter of routine.

So if this is a mystery game, it sounds pretty easy, right? Like Poirot would say, "as if!" Mystery House is unintuitive, frustrating and near impossible to complete unassisted - but not because of the mystery. This is a game about a house. The player's time is occupied not by the solving of murders but discovering secret passages and tunnels within the house or wrangling the text parser to do things like turn on the faucet in a kitchen sink ("WATER ON").

Navigation should be as simple as typing either "NORTH", "SOUTH", "EAST" or "WEST" where appropriate, but any doors, gates, stairways or holes all require unique commands that you must figure out as you go along, like constantly relearning how to walk or "GO HOLE". It isn't this easy, either. Often these compass points don't even correspond correctly to what's on the screen. Exiting a room through the west door may take you outside, into a forest, where you might think typing "EAST" would bring you back inside, but actually the right command would be "UP". Go east and you delve further into the forest, which appears to be infinite in all directions and every screen of it literally identical.

The game is remarkably unhelpful about all of this, actually. If you're on a stairway and want to go UP STAIRS, Mystery House responds, I DON'T UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU MEAN. Then adds, as though you are confused: YOU ARE ON A STAIRWAY.

The true challenge of Mystery House arises from handicapping the player's ability to function within a world. The art is often incomprehensible: you don't know what you're meant to be looking at. The text parser dismisses direct requests out of hand as clearly nonsensical. The rules change on a whim: from one screen to another, up literally becomes down. Interaction is necessary but often punished: lighting a stove, for instance, will cause it to immediately explode and kill the player. Ultimately, through technical and design ineptitude, the basic act of survival is made a constant struggle.

And in that way, Mystery House is something more than the first graphic adventure: it's the first survival horror game.

Read literally, Mystery House is not a mystery story but a recurring nightmare, unbound from real world logic. You appear on the doorstep of an unfamiliar house with no idea why you should be there. The world is rendered in unclear black, green and purple murk. Seven strange people, all alike, stand motionless in the foyer, staring at you, but you cannot touch them or speak to them. Then they vanish, and you find them dead. There is no way to leave the house. Once you enter the front door, it locks behind you. You walk through a door in the kitchen and into an endless forest. Dying doesn't end the dream: it only sets you back outside that front door, to look at those creepy people again, to find that book of matches again, and light them and lose them one by one, staving off the darkness in interminable style. You cannot talk. It is difficult to move. This is the nightmare where you are in danger and cannot make your legs walk.

In this nightmare, all you can do is run through this empty chamber of a house forever, because you don't know how to leave it and perhaps cannot, fumbling around in the dark while you are told, repeatedly, that you are bad at things like moving.

Catharsis comes in Mystery House not when the mystery is solved but when you start attacking the house itself. Later in the game, you must pull furniture and masonry apart, let fires burn holes in the floor and smash down walls with a sledgehammer. You are not exploring the house at this point: you are violating it. And after all it's put you through, seeing this house destroyed is a welcome brutality.

When the end arrives, the killer is dead and you've found both the jewels and the key to the front door: the exit, at last, to this house. You open the door, you go door, and are informed via simple text that you've won the game. Then, it asks, would you like to play again?

I type "no", and press enter.

And then, no kidding, the game cuts to this:

You will never leave this house.

Nobody likes Mystery House. But this house always wins.

At War with the Vikings

There’s something to be said for running away from one’s problems. Specifically, the following text.

In times of personal crisis, the prospect of getting away from absolutely everything is highly attractive. I like to believe there’s something positive to be gained from packing up and absconding to some far away place, not permanently, but for what you’d call a lost weekend or similar expression of self-indulgence. At minimum, this is the act of clearing one’s head, but ideally it’d also bring some clarity of purpose or contentment. By escaping all the factors and circumstances that define a life and diving into total randomness, one might discover meaning, even wisdom, in the chaos.

My lost weekend was just a Thursday. Immediately following a break-up and a number of work opportunities all simultaneously and meaningfully cratering, I decided to get away from London for a while. The next day, before dawn, I boarded a train for the city of York, some 200 miles north.

All I really knew about York is that it was ruled by Vikings in the Middle Ages. During this period, the city we now know was called the Kingdom of Jorvik. As you’d expect, a big part of the city’s tourism is Viking stuff. Vikings! What could be better? The uncomplicated psyche and fundamental home truths of primal Viking life might be the perfect thing to cut through my specifically modern problems.

For tourists, one of York’s biggest draws is the Jorvik Viking Centre, which boasts a thorough and vivid recreation of a village straight out of Viking times. “Come face to face with a Viking,” it is promised. Visitors access this medieval village via time car, named of course for its time-travelling properties.

I head for the Jorvik Viking Centre in the late morning. It’s when I, as a lone adult male, get in line behind an entire classroom of French schoolchildren, that I start to think this might be weird.

Once the thirty children have all been processed, I buy a ticket in the lobby. “Just one?” asks the woman behind the counter. I confirm this is the case.

Before we arrive at the Viking village itself, there’s a room downstairs that serves as a waystation between the timelines. In this dimly lit chamber, there are a lot of placards and LCD displays detailing the history of the Viking presence in York. Under our feet, a glass floor reveals human bones and Viking trinkets, all discovered by an archaeological dig in the last century, strewn through the dirt. The French children and their chaperones meander around the room in small groups, cross-checking the information on the walls with worksheets of Viking-related homework.

There’s some Viking Centre staff down here too, all clothed in period Viking garb. I assume that this is the official staff uniform but perhaps it’s an amazing coincidence. In the stairwell, two Vikings flirt lightly. Another Viking wanders the floor. “Oh, feel free to ask me any questions,” he announces vaguely to his dispersed audience. Ask a Viking – what an opportunity! I note that nobody seems interested in taking him up on his offer. In fairness, the only questions I can think to ask him – “Do you ever feel like you’re just drifting?” “Have you ever been in love?” “Viking, are you ever lonely?” – would not be appropriate in this academic setting.

A few words about the time car. It’s less of a car, I can see now, than a big motorised seat attached to a ceiling track. Not exactly the DeLorean. The time car is parked in a corner, where it departs this waystation and enters a time tunnel. Admittance to the time car is governed by another Viking. I make my way over to him, accidentally cutting in line before two small French girls. (“Cut in front of me in the time car queue like one of your French girls,” it is often remarked.)

“Just you, sir?” asks the Viking – like a viking would ever call somebody sir.

“Yes.”

“Enter the time car.” He doesn’t say this.

To my disappointment, the time car will be ferrying me through the entirety of the village, rather than just dropping me off discreetly from a block or two away. It runs on a rail on a programmed course at a leisurely pace. My first Viking sighting on this tour through time is two Viking kids playing in the mud, and at first I’m shocked that this operation has roped in child actors. But as I draw closer I realise that they aren’t real people in Viking suits, but automatons.

From there, I proceed down a receiving line of animatronic Viking characters, each introduced in the very proper English tones of my time car audio guide. I meet Sigurd the antler worker, Unni the woodworker, a couple of fishermen, a blacksmith and some assholes arguing about what to have for dinner (Some things never change, notes my narrator wryly). As I ride past, they speak a sentence in Old Norse and jerk around a little bit, affecting the motions of their purported trades. This goes on for about ten minutes. The whole experience, I am told, is supposedly enhanced through the addition of realistic and unsanitary Viking odours, but actually the gift shop I visit afterwards smelled worse by a significant and nauseating margin.

Before the ride ends, there’s a hell of a denouement in store. We come to one last Viking, squatting in an open-air medieval toilet and straining audibly to take a dump. Unsuccessfully, I might add. Rounding him in the time car, I hear him groan and grunt and fart a little bit. Then the ride is over, and an elderly woman in the middle of her knitting helps me to disembark the time car. I leave the Viking Centre quickly.

That’s pretty much the whole story. Having left home despondent and in search of some kind of personal illumination or epiphany, what I get – sometimes, all you ever get – is a robot Viking taking a shit. And I never quite stop thinking about this toilet-bound Viking, this poor guy. Consider what defines his existence. He was built to try and do one thing – one very particular, disgusting thing – yet no matter how hard he tries, he is, by cruel design, incapable of ever achieving that goal. His life is Lucy Van Pelt pulling the football away from Charlie Brown. He is trapped forever on the cusp of almost there. So he squats in the corner, in an Ouroboros prison of unfulfillment, a textbook failure for generations of children to laugh about when they pass by, and whenever they might think of him.