Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMO Gamers to the Next Level!

Peter Beagle is at least as well-known for his screenwriting credits as for his novels. Writing for movies helped Beagle approach writing in an episodic "shorthand": "Movies are so modular, I learned to 'skip'... it used to drive me nuts, I think linearly... I'm learning to apply this to writing, it can save you a lot of steps. When I was first learning to write screenplays, the guy that was giving me a crash course said, 'When you write books, you have the luxury of a narrator. You don't have that here, and don't even think of using voice-overs. If you've ever looked at a screenplay, you'll see how much of it is movement and how little is diaglogue. You have to learn to let the camera tell the story.' And that was the hardest thing to learn." But learn he did. He wrote the Trekkie-beloved episode "Sarek" (from Star Trek: The Next Generation), the screenplay for The Lord of the Rings animated film in the late 70s, and at least 15 other television, movie, and theatrical productions including the animated version of his own masterpiece: The Last Unicorn.

In light of all this, it comes as a surprise that Beagle's only steady wages since the 1960s have come from singing in a southern California French Restaurant for $25 a night and a nice meal. All of the hardship seems to have made Beagle a more capable writer. "I had to be flexible, I had to be adaptable... I usually had people to feed. I still do. The other part of that is that I hate repeating myself. I really try to make my works different from each other, and it's probably costing me money because people sometimes don't want something different, just perhaps a small variant." He related a story of an editor who sent him an "8th-grade Tolkien ripoff", wanting Peter to comment. When he had nothing good to say, she simply said she knew what she was doing, that the story was for those who'd read Lord of the Rings 40 times and couldn't pick it up for the 41st. "And she was right. The book sold a million copies. For as much as I joke about being unprincipled, there are some things I just can't change about my writing."

One of Beagle's principles is to convey a story through names in the tradition of a few of his eclectic inspirations, Lord Dunsany. "Characters make references to things in their world-- that are part of their common knowledge. You don't have to know what they're talking about, it's not important to the story. But it's a way of bringing readers in." And once they're in, Beagle enjoys catching readers off-guard. Besides lines that punch you in the face, like reading a host's invitation to "have a taco" in the middle of the medieval fantasy world of The Last Unicorn ("It cracked me up," Beagle quipped, "It still does"), Beagle's characters are surprising enough in their own right. The

Sometimes the most colorful characters are the arch-villains themselves: "I've always felt sorry for my villains, with one exception: Captain Jeffries in Tamsin... who was based on a real person, and an absolute maniac." When I noted that Beagle's villains were always human rather than any other kind of creature, he said "I realized a long time ago that monsters don't scare me, people scare me. There's a limit to what monsters can do, there's no limit to what people can do. Maybe it's from living in the wake of the Holocaust." Recalling specific villain stereotypes, a few came to mind: "Vampires have always bored the bejesus out of me. They talk too much, they whine, they go on and on, but any vampire that purely views humans as little 'happy meals' on legs [a reference to Spike in Buffy, the Vampire Slayer- a favorite TV series of Beagle's], they have my whole attention... I've always had a lot of sympathy for the werewolf, who didn't ask for this."

Beagle is fascinated by the thought process of his villains. Citing a quote from a cousin of his who's also an actor: "The thing you have to remember is that a villain is not a villain to himself. He never wakes up in the morning and says, 'Well, here goes for another nice day of setting fire to orphan's homes and kicking grandmothers down stairs.' It's not like that. The villain has his reasons, and though they might suck from the outside perspective, they're perfectly good to him. 'It's lamentable that these people keep getting in my way and I have to kill them... You think I enjoy this? I don't enjoy this, but it's just... I gotta do this to do what I have to do.'"

Beagle is genuinely approachable and incredibly easy to talk to, neither saying too much or too little, and always has an interesting story at hand. But there comes a point when anyone can get tired of smiling and small talk. "I've said to Connor [Beagle's editor and friend], 'OK, I've been adorable all day, now I need to go out and kick something.'" When I noted that many gamers approach games like Horizons in order to "kick something," he laughed and nodded assent. But the longtime author seems displeased with how aimlessly violent some MMOs have become. From a storyteller's point-of-view, not having been inculcated with graphical videogame violence since the 1980s, I imagine that going out and killing 20 beetles, rats, and snakes and taking away only experience would look kind of sadistic- a dark mental recipe for future psychopaths. Fortunately we don't identify ourselves that closely with videogame heroes, but still, I imagine Beagle's quest and storyline work will be less "kill 20 blightrats" than to immerse yourself in the environment, following the clues that lead you ultimately to an enemy deserving of an untimely demise.