WCTM? behind the scenes

Archived from groups: rec.games.int-fiction (More info?)

Hi everyone,

N B Horvath here, author of "Who Created That Monster?" from this
year's Comp. My sincere thanks to everyone who played this game,
particularly to those who posted reviews and sent comments to me
individually. I was pleased to see that the RGIF discussion of the game
was quite civil, despite the incendiary subject matter.

I've thought about my game a lot since the Comp. For what it's worth, I
agree with much of the criticism leveled at it in the reviews. In this
little essay, I'd like to address the question, "What was the author
thinking ... ?" in hopes of getting some closure on the game.

One of my main goals was to yoke together two different types of
worldview:

(1) the emotionally charged, black-and-white geopolitical picture
suggested by some pro-war rhetoric (e.g., "Axis of Evil" ); and
(2) the out-of-control, cartoon-violent fantasy world of games like
Detective.

Why? Because I saw a good deal of (1) present in my country (I'm
American), and this was deeply upsetting to me. Then I came to see the
comic absurdity of (2) as a way of confronting it, in a satirical game.

As lots of players deduced from the beginning, I had the US in mind as
the answer to my game's title question. Granted, the reality is far
more complicated: A BBC News article,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3324053.stm , says that the USSR
was Iraq's main arms supplier in the 80s and that multiple major
Western nations were involved as well. Still, the US was one of those
nations, despite common knowledge of Saddam's atrocities. In writing
this game, I aimed to draw attention to that fact and to the problem it
poses for a pro-American black-and-white world view.

Furthermore, in pinning the blame on a random second-tier nation in the
game world, I aimed to express an impression I got from the run-up to
the Iraq war: that powerful people can practically just MAKE STUFF UP,
and people will buy it, even if it's implausible. I was glad that Dan
Shiovitz mentioned Ron Suskind's "create your own reality" article in
his comments on WCTM? --- it is apropos.

NBH