Something Good #74: Games and Zines and Artificial Things
An interview with author Jim Munroe
I met Jim Munroe in a church basement at some point in the mid-1990s. I was tentatively dipping my toes in the independent Toronto zine scene of the time, in which this tall, friendly individual seemed firmly established, with his photocopied publication Celtic Pamplemousse and a variety of interesting one-offs and fiction projects. Zines were an important portal (along with BBSes, used book and record stores, and weird little cafes) into a world of vibrant, self-made culture that I had only previously dreamt of from my bedroom. They still inspire me to this day; in many ways I consider this newsletter a sort of zine.
Jim was also, impressively, an extremely prolific writer of fiction, and specifically science fiction, a passion of mine. I had a window onto his novels from the onset, lucky enough as I was to be an early reader of his books going back three decades now. His first novel, the indie sci-fi Flyboy Action Hero Comes With Gas Mask, was published by HarperCollins, before Jim decided he no longer wanted to effectively work for Rupert Murdoch (a decision that has aged extremely well) and decided to self-publish going forward. At the time it seemed nuts—he’d already scored every young novelist’s dream, publishing a well-received debut with a major publisher!—but that decision has also aged well, as the stigma around self-publishing has largely evaporated.
After a few more (great) sci-fi novels, Jim began to focus his energies on other creative outlets, founding the video game arts organization Hand Eye Society, making his own games, comics, movies… the guy is productive in a way that puts the rest of us all to shame. But now, after a long absence from the form, he’s back with a new novel, We Are Raccoons, that plays to his (and my) obsessions in a big way: the strange and mundane possibilities of near-future tech, indie video game design (Jim is also a working narrative designer for a game studio), A.I. The story of a group of game designer friends who sort of accidentally invoke the singularity, it’s already gotten advance raves from names in the space like Cory Doctorow, Charlie Jane Anders, Peter Watts, and… me! I was again an early reader and I enjoyed it immensely. I am also enjoying the rollout of the book, in which Jim is self-publishing 165 unique hardcover editions, each with a unique, A.I.-generated cover.
It could not seem like a better week to discuss all of this.
Mark Slutsky: I feel like everything is coming full circle right now because, well, for one, I recently made a zine for the first time in decades. And the way we know each other is because I picked up one of your zines in the early ’90s at a small press fair in a church basement in Toronto. I noticed in the back of your zine that you had an email address, and I had one too, but I didn’t know anybody else who did. So I emailed you.
Jim Munroe: Right—“Hey, fellow email guy!”
MS: It seems very innocent now.
We obviously have a lot of preoccupations in common. We both ended up in professional game development, and game dev is a really big part of your new book.
I’ve always struggled with the questions of how narrative and games should best mesh together, even though that’s you know, nominally my job as a video game writer. Can you talk about how it found its way into your story?
JM: I really have a love for the game community. It’s sort of the first community I encountered that was similar to zines. Because people were basically doing it because they loved it, they loved the idea of it and they wanted to get something out there. It was very unpretentious and very non-careerist in some ways.
A lot of game creators are usually very smart. They have a multitude of talents that they're bringing to focus on a project. Games are obviously a huge commercial industry, but they're still kind of in the cultural gutter in terms of how people view them. Their cultural value is very diminished and very talked down.
It was the same as zines! People who were interested in self-publishing were also going against the grain, because people who wanted to be, quote-unquote, real writers, wouldn’t ever self-publish. As a result, it kept a lot of people unpublished and not finding an audience. Whereas in zines, people were just like, fuck it, I’m just going to do it.
There were so many similarities between the zine community and the game community, in terms of people being willing to ignore the consensus, people being up for just creating stuff and trying to connect with people who like their stuff.
That was a big impetus for writing this book, trying to document what I consider basically an art scene in the game creator world and looking at different types of game creators as opposed to the way they’re usually presented in media, as just one kind of guy who makes the game.
The same way you could look at authors—you might have one who’s a romance writer, and one who’s a literary writer, and one who’s a science fiction write—there’s an understood diversity of kinds of writers. But I don’t think the general public knows that there’s such a variety and richness of modes of creation in the games world. To a certain extent I wanted to celebrate and document that, because I’ve been involved with it for about 20 years at this stage.
MS: You did these A.I.-generated, unique covers for your book, using text prompts from the novel. I enjoyed flipping through them on your website and seeing what the exact texts were that inspired them. There was something beautiful about that—about the imaginary link between the words and the cover, it was just very pleasing to see. And I could imagine how pleasing it was to get those results yourself and pick which ones to use. I assume you did a bit of filtering.
JM: Yeah. It was semiautomated in the sense that first I just went through the text of the book looking for things that were visually evocative, or engaging, or might have something interesting in them and just basically cut and pasted them straight into the Midjourney Discord to generate.
I went through the whole book and I basically pulled what I took to be everything that I thought had a glimmer of having something interesting. So I figured there's about 165 evocative phrases in the book—which is a weird metric to realize for a 100,000-word book!
What Midjourney will do at first is give you four options. So from there, I’d choose one. The weird thing was that there was almost always one of the four that stood out. There was a really high success rate in terms of what I considered usable.
MS: Did you use modifiers like “painting” or “photo” or “trending on ArtStation”?
JM: No. For one, I was lazy, and two, I just wanted to see what the raw stuff was.
Realistically, if you like at Midjourney stuff, it’s quite obvious for anybody who looks at all the different A.I. generators that it obviously is Midjourney. There’s an aesthetic that it propagates. I don’t know enough about why, or what’s under the hood, to comment on why, but I found it interesting. To the extent where I was specific in the copyright page that this was Midjourney 3.0 circa October, 2022. Because I think that what will probably happen is that certain schools of thought will eventually be like, “Oh, we’re really into 3.0.”
MS: In 20 years people will be excavating the code from an ancient iteration of Midjourney that’s come back into fashion.
What’s interesting to me is that people are concerned—and I have lots of concerns myself—that this is going to take away the labour in the artistic process and all ths human work will become automated. This is a really central anxiety. But it sounds to me that you spent more time doing this, burned way more of your hours, than you would have for a typical book cover commission.
JM: In terms of my labour yes. I haven’t added up the hours yet, but I’ve logged them, so I’ll know. But it’s definitely more involved.
MS: At the same, you do now have 165 unique covers, so maybe it’s an unfair comparison.
JM: That’s right, it’s produced a lot more.
I still work with my designer Terry, who laid out the type and made sure every cover was consistent. What’s different is that I used to work with him and an artist and there would be rounds of drafts and feedback. The process was a little removed on some level.
This was just very direct. It was just like, I’m making choices. That’s good, let’s do that, done. Churning through it in a way that felt semi-automated.
It felt a little like cha-chunking down on the stapler when making zines. Putting on some music and doing that busywork, cutting and pasting addresses into webforms that I need to send out to the printer, all those types of things.
MS: An artist friend of mine calls that “shit work.” Work that’s not generating any new creative material, but like, you kinda need to do sometimes for your mental health.
JM: It’s meditative and it’s grounding in a way.
Releasing the book, I reached out to a couple of illustrator collaborators that I’d worked with in the past to let them know I was doing this. I was curious to know what their thoughts were and had a bit of a discussion with them about it. They brought up feelings of dread, which I totally understand. I used that as a starting point for my own reflections on the ethics of it.
Most of the artists I know, the lucky ones, the ones who have made hard-won careers out of this craft are often working way longer hours than average people work. Maybe 10 hours a day trying to create that perfect image. It’s a lot of labour, and part of me feels like some level of automation is not a negative in that regard. Maybe it’s a starting point, like starting with a photo as a reference instead of something out of your head.
MS: I’m trying to understand my own anxieties about it and question them. The big one is of course, as an artist, what if I’m just… replaced? But I find it hard to see that actually happening.
One thing that I do feel anxious about it, if I try and pin it down, is the amount of stuff that I’ll now have to process. Like, if I can just generate an unlimited amount of images that I like or stories that please me… I already have too many things to read and and look at!
I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around it. I see a lot of people posting their conversations with chatbots, and some of them are interesting, but most of them I don’t have the bandwidth for. I don’t really care that this thing is pretending to be human.
JM: But for you is there an underlying layer of like, “I don’t want to look at that”?
MS: I’m sure that there is. A lot of it, though, is like, “Look, this thing sounds real!” And it’s like, OK, but what else is there for me to engage with. It’s like saying, “Look, I had a boring conversation with another human being! Isn’t that interesting?”
That said, I really do enjoy playing with these things! There’s something really pleasing about it. We’re seeing a lot of A.I. selfies being shared now, and I do wonder how much of it is sort of solipsistic, like sharing your Spotify Wrapped, everybody loves doing it but nobody else really cares.
JM: There was a Wired article that talked about how billions of images are created, but most of them for an audience of one.
MS: Yes, exactly.
JM: But the question is, is there anything wrong with that?
MS: No, I don’t think there is. I enjoy playing with them, and in a way it almost calms me down, because the fact that they’re mostly interesting to me, or to the person who created them, makes them, in my mind, less likely to replace human beings as creators of things for other people.
JM: It would be neat if everybody who bought the book had an individualized cover, almost like a small-batch artisanal, bespoke kind of thing.
The thing that I find really fun is that out of all the books I’ve sold so far, about half of the people have requested specific covers. Which means that they’ve gone through them and they’ve picked their favourite.
And the weird thing is, they’re all fucking different. There’s no overlap. Almost everybody got their first choice.
We Are Raccoons is still available for pre-order in limited edition hardcover.
Speaking of zines, I was surprised and delighted to find that the zine I made of Something Good issue 27, “A Lost Children’s Story,” was nominated for a 2021 Expozine Award. To mark this lovely occasion, I have printed up a bunch more. Please email me if you want a copy; I’m happy to send you one, free of charge, anywhere in the world, as a thank-you for reading. (However, I won’t say no to a #nojacketsrequired submission in return.)
Also to commemorate this occasion, I asked OpenAI’s ChatGPT to try and reconstruct the lost story for me.
Once upon a time, in the beautiful city of Vienna, a young boy named Max found himself trapped in a cozy café as a fierce snowstorm raged outside.
The café was warm and inviting, with the aroma of freshly brewed coffee and baked pastries filling the air. Max sat at a small table near the window, watching the snowflakes dance in the air and pile up on the ground outside.
At first, Max was a little scared and unsure of what to do. He had been out exploring the city with his parents when the storm had suddenly hit, and they had rushed into the nearest café for shelter. But as the minutes passed, Max began to relax and enjoy himself.
He ordered a hot chocolate and a slice of Sachertorte, the famous Viennese chocolate cake, and sipped and savored each delicious bite. He chatted with the friendly waitstaff and other patrons, who were all huddled inside, enjoying the warmth and safety of the café.
Max's parents were worried about the storm, but Max was having the time of his life. He felt like he was part of a special adventure, and he didn't want it to end.
As the night wore on and the snow continued to fall, Max and the others in the café settled in for the long haul. They played games, told stories, and sang songs to pass the time. And Max felt happier and more content than he had in a long time.
Eventually, the storm subsided and the snow began to ease up. Max and his parents were able to make their way back to their hotel, but Max knew that he would never forget the special memories he had made that night in the cozy Viennese café.
Ooooookay.
Somehow feel better and worse at the same time.
Bonus track:
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