Play This Only At Night: Liner Notes – DJ/Beatmaker

Time for another piece of the liner notes for Play This Only At Night, and we’ll be looking at the first choice that I wrote, the DJ or Beatmaker. Once again, if you haven’t already played through it, go ahead and do the damn thing and come back to read this later. For everyone else, let’s get in tune.

Play This Only At Night: Liner Notes

One of my favorite things to do as a kid (and still now, when I get the chance) after I bought music was to go through the liner notes and see who played what instruments, who wrote what lyrics, what songs were sampled, etc. Hip Hop was great for this, because not only did you get to know the music you copped better, you also learned about tons of different music you might not have otherwise. I can trace my love for jazz, soul, and international music directly to rap albums. I was able to go backwards and dig into various music scenes, and find bands that I could get in on the ground floor with by following various punk and rock band personnel across their careers. The practice influences my writing just as much as any other piece of writing or media, as I find myself unconsciously dropping in references in the hopes that someone will catch them and find a new fave. Play This Only At Night is no exception.

I’ll be periodically dropping little liner notes for each section of Play This Only At Night here, with links and assorted media when it’s applicable. Spoilers from this point forward, so if you haven’t already played through it, go do the damn thing. It’s short but powerful, like a punk song, or a MF Doom single.

Play This Only At Night: A ‘Create & Devastate’ Story

When I came up with the setting for my Lasers & Feelings hack, Create & Devastate, I was worried that people might not quite understand the setting. It’s one thing to simply say it’s inspired by YA dystopian fiction and Hip Hop, or to link to a playlist of music. It’s another thing entirely to give people potentially playing it a clear idea of what the setting looks like, especially when a lot of other L&F hacks are made to emulate a familiar genre or existing work of fiction. Create & Devastate’s got very specific component parts, but I think the whole’s unique to my head.

So instead of my usual tactic of jabbering at someone until I’ve convinced myself that I’ve bored them to tears, I designed to make a companion piece for the game. I’ve always been a fan of Choose Your Own Adventure style entertainment, starting with those books that so many of us grew up with. Since a big source of inspiration for the RPG was nostalgia for the past, and using creativity as an escape for less than desirable surroundings, I thought interactive fiction might be the perfect medium to tackle things. When I saw that Inkle Studios made their scripting language ink open source (with a handy tutorial to boot), I jumped at it and got to work.

With the preamble out of the way, I give you Play This Only At Night: A ‘Create & Devastate’ Story, a story that can serve as a prelude for any game of Create & Devastate, whether you’re playing or running it. It’s also just a brief look at a world that I created, and that I may return to and expand on. Hosted on itch.io right now:

Play Now