Role playing in video games made us good writers

An interview with Gabi Abrao, aka Sighswoon

I hold the immense professional privilege of being Gabi Abrao’s publisher for her first full-length book of poetry Notes on Shapeshifting. The collaborative process hit several categories of what I find to be a delicious, generative work environment — enough challenge to coax out what’s already brewing, clear understanding of intention and goals, precise communicative stances that enabled this manuscript to crystalize into a book.

Shaun Roberts crafted two variations of the cover jacket that we loved so much it was decided we had to run two limited edition hardcovers sporting both variations. Shaun is a dream designer — literally, in the sense that he somehow has this psionic ability to probe into the mind of the author to extract design concepts that achieve wildly exact aesthetic goals. Gabi made this part of the book’s development easy, already being a visual person, by supplying Shaun with this vision board; the echo of the final covers already visible at this stage.

The manuscript largely consisting of writing that Gabi had previously published in some form or another online was then massaged through the lens of Rhiannon McGavin, Gabi’s editor. McGavin, a tremendous poet in her own right, also holds a supremely online upbringing having started publishing YouTube videos at the age of twelve. This combination of literary finesse and online voyaging, mutual at the technical core of McGavin and Abrao, produced an incredibly thoughtful, refined collection that achieves exactly what we set out for it to do; to soothe and arouse.

Months before the book’s publishing date on a warm summer day, Gabi and I met at the Hammer Museum where she used to work for some brunch, conversation, and contemplation. Here’s what we talked about.

LOS ANGELES LOCALS ON LOS ANGELES

DL: What should people not from LA know about LA?

GA: The common misconception is that people are self-centered and snobby. My whole thing is, they're passionate and focused. This is a city of people who are attempting to self-actualize. Usually in creative industries, whether that's film or contemporary art or literature; this is the creative city, right? It requires a lot of self interest to be a creative person, in a way that I encourage. This can be misinterpreted as a lack of care for others, but I want my artists to be self-interested. People are here for a reason. 

DL: Have we ever talked about this Cameron Esposito quote? 

GA: I don't think so. 

DL: I can't remember what journal this was in, and I'm paraphrasing, but it's basically something like, “Los Angeles provides a logical backbone to completely illogical pursuits.” I read that as, it’s a space where you can come, implant, and grow no matter what it is. 

GA: That’s so good. 

DL: And it’s definitely spurred on by the Hollywood dream, the entertainment industry, but that essence has far exceeded any industry at this point. We have so many vibrant, creative fields that have blossomed from entertainment.

GA: Totally. Yeah, there's a shelf for anything. Even the weirdest stuff. It's really great. I feel for people who don’t see that. There's so much to enjoy when you’re in LA as this bustling, anything is possible, stimulating place. Also, I think what people miss about LA is how international it is. 

DL: Of course. 

GA: That's why my parents moved here. LA is the city of range.

DL: Big time. I definitely can see how the scope of it, the sheer size of LA… perhaps it's a similar effect of too many items on a menu, people can get really stuck and assume that one section of LA is the whole LA experience, or not even know where to go, what to pick. 

GA: I always say LA is like an amusement park, because you know exactly what you’ll get in each area, right? I know who I’ll see where, what kind of aesthetics I’ll get, I know what kind of experience I’ll have. Now that I'm a bit older, I love that. 

ROLE PLAYING IN VIDEO GAMES MADE US GOOD WRITERS

DL: The early Internet days. We share a bond over Neopets. I’m curious to hear how the Internet influenced your writing, the development of your writing. Did you encounter Habbo Hotel as well? 

GA: I did. I didn't get addicted to that one, but I spent time in it.

DL: So for me the trajectory was Neopets, Habbo Hotel, and then this massively multiplayer online role playing game called Final Fantasy XI. 

GA: Oh, wow. 

DL: And this was a precursor to the era that was then EverQuest 2, and then World of Warcraft. There was a pocket of time between 2003 to 2004, where things in that MMO sphere just exploded. 

GA: What’s an MMO? 

DL: Massively multiplayer online role playing game. Or MMORPG. In the sense where it's, you know, you can see the scale of something like hundreds of people simultaneously doing this thing at once. 

GA: And now that's everything, right? Video games, a lot of them you can gather and see the little thought bubbles.

DL: Definitely. That online component is intermingled with almost everything now. Living games. 

GA: They’re places. 

DL: In the 90’s and early aughts, there was this mystery to the Internet, a mystery to these online places before everything got, I don't know. Everything feels very revealed now. There's no secret, no mystery. Just attention grabbing. That might be a bit cynical.

GA: Yeah, maybe that’s what it is. Experiencing Neopets felt rare. Even discovering that game at the time was like, holy shit. This is such unique technology, you know? Now everyone’s trying to sell me this.

DL: With those games, especially as we got deeper into the multiplayer element of it, they were so instrumental in the development of my writing. Suddenly I was immersed and building so much language and so much communication with whatever audience online.

GA: You're writing every day. 

DL: Exactly. And so by the time I’m in high school, well, I can type very fast. 

GA: Yeah, I was the fastest typer in my class. That goes to show you that our experience is a bit rare, you know what I mean? Not everyone was at home getting Interneted out. That's crazy. So what would happen in these games? What would you talk about?

DL: Gosh, I mean, especially in games like World of Warcraft, which I played fervently throughout high school, it became incredibly personal. We had a guild, your guild is the group of people that you're consistently playing the content with, and you have all this end-game content where it requires big teams. And so in those early days, you needed a team of 40 individual people to run what is called a raid, which is basically a big boss that needed 40 people to coordinate together to beat it. It took a lot of time and cooperation. People got close. 

GA: Oh, that's so fun. Those were good days, weren’t they? 

DL: They really were. 

GA: I feel that though, those big online days. Neopets for me… many things trip me out about this, but in Neopets I was a big role player, and the scene was always “fairy school,” because of course I dreamed of a world where I could do whatever I wanted, plus the magic aspect. It worked on these chat forums, which you probably remember, where it's, you know… type your little story, send, wait 5 minutes for a response, repeat. Scenes would go on and on. And that was the first actual writing where, I'm nine years old giving myself a name and being like, her eyes were purple. 

DL: That's an incredible creative exercise. You're embodying this entity that you’ve invented on the spot. 

GA: Creating dialog, right? 

DL: Very complicated environments. 

GA: It was improv too, because someone else is reacting to you. You'd have someone really vibing with your narrative, at the same time you have the asshole that’s trying to kill you off, sometimes trolls. It was so fun. I always tried to make it into social media, which you weren't allowed to do. I was doing role play for a while, always being the fairy in fairy school, but later I got into being myself. I would even post pictures of myself, and it became… remember on Neopets, you could have “pet pages,” which were literally open customizable websites? I would post graphics that I made on Photoshop, I would post photos of myself with something written on my hand like, “peace.” 

DL: The early sighswoon. 

GA: Yes! I think it's so funny because people will be like, “How did the influencer thing happen?” It’s just, I’ve always been posting, even when I wasn’t supposed to. 

DL: I love that. 

GA: Then Tumblr became big for me. Neopets was huge. I loved Neopets. I went so hard on Neopets. I did everything. Made a bunch of Neopoints. The role play. I did everything. My dad was the one who got me really into computers early on. 

DL: Oh yeah? 

GA: He was single handedly responsible for it. He felt like computers were going to become everything. He was working on computers all of the time doing his business, communicating with people back in Brazil. He taught me Photoshop when I was seven, made sure we had a shared family computer we could hop on. But yeah, Neopets, to MySpace, then Tumblr came to me in 2009. My first post says, “Ah, my sister got one of these and maybe I'll use it. It seems pretty cool.” Now… a thousand pages later! All of my writing is stored there. And I still use it, still write into Tumblr, because it takes me back to this time, this early excitement with writing posts, acting like someone’s listening. Even with my book’s manuscript, I would go back to Tumblr and write portions in a text post because it’s so familiar, it feels good. 

DL: It's a drafting table. 

GA: Exactly. I love it. I didn’t have Tumblr fame, but I did have a small community of people. I remember the first time I felt like a writer was when someone sent me a photo where they’d quoted me in their journal by hand. I felt, woah, this is what I do, too. Something about that felt notable to me. 

DL: You saw the impact you had on a stranger. 

GA: Totally. It was so striking. Someone thinks I’m worthy of a quote! It really hit me. And that was Tumblr, and not even being big on Tumblr. This person found me by accident. I love that about Tumblr. Now incentives have changed… Instagram, TikTok, every incentive is to go viral, and be seen, you know? But nobody was doing that on Tumblr, there was no way. So you literally find someone by being like, “Oh, I love this photo. Oh, I like their page. Oh, I'm going to follow them.” And now I'm reading their 4am poem or whatever. That was important. I think it's so important that, especially now, if people remember that Tumblr was so great because there wasn't that incentive to have an identity. To be famous or to make money. There was no way to make freakin’ money on Tumblr. And that made it so pure, you know?

DL: Yeah, pure digital vibing. 

GA: You just wrote to write. It was so great. A very special place. 

DL: It's interesting thinking about how the incentive structure has changed and how we've rigged ourselves to think about social media in terms of visibility, pop virality, rather than thinking about content in that fun, exploratory sense. We see this in writing. Especially with poets trying to get started, where, it’s this… No one is thinking about perennial content anymore. Things that will stand the test of time, expand as its relevance stays static. Everyone is chasing viral dopamine rushes, a flash in the pan.  

GA: I agree with that entirely. I'm trying to fix that about myself. Not only fix it, but keep it up. I was actually saying this at the reading, where social media in general has killed the archive, only emphasizing your most recent posts, encouraging new daily content. That's how people define you. And it's an illusion because if you really did care about that person, you would research them. If someone inspires you, look up their interviews. Go back into the depths of their feed. If I’m obsessed with someone, I would go all the way back to your first post… I'll look at everything, right? I wonder if people still do that. 

For the artist, they have to remember, “I'm a body of work.” I'm not my most recent post and the likes it got. It's easy to get that way because the incentive is there. You have to value the archive every day. 

DL: Do you want to look at some exhibits? 

GA: Yeah, let's do it.