A new low from nitw creators
Comparing a video game character to an actual person
Happy Halloween, everyone (and the NITW reddit, you dirty spies). It’s been a rainy, pleasantly chilly autumn here. Given how often we’ve recently had hot humid Octobers, we are very very pleased. We’ve been very busy but we’ve managed to get out to some interesting remote places. In some future update I’ll show you some pics.
So it’s been a couple months since the last update, as is standard. It seems like several years. Many people have reached out to see how we were doing, but we’re the least vulnerable and affected people in the radius of this whole thing that happened. So I’ll keep this part very brief- we’re fine. It’s been hard. We’re still very sad and angry, not gonna lie. Not sure when that will pass. Can’t rush it. But we’re fine. Thanks for your support. Please continue to support all of the other people in this situation who were a lot closer to Alec, and the folks who will never get any closure now. It’s all the furthest thing from neat and uncomplicated. Sometimes that’s how things are and you have to do the best you can with that. But we’re fine, don’t give us another thought.
I’m going to talk a bit about Alec-related things, so if you’d rather not, please skip to after the second divider.
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There isn’t a lot more for me to say in some big forum. And you didn’t back a kickstarter to watch us unpack our shit for months and years. And since we can only really speak for ourselves, we have to lay it to rest. We said what we needed to get out about Alec. It felt horrible, but for us and several other people something like that needed to be said. So you do the best you can. I hope that years of us talking publicly and here about his good qualities and how grateful we were to him for the contributions he made when he was actually engaged paints a complicated picture of the guy. Because people are complicated. But like I said, no one has some all-encompassing view of anyone, particularly in our situation. I will say that I think anyone’s take on the Alec they knew is valid. None of those snapshots are necessarily in conflict, just things taken from different angles. So if you’ve got great memories of the guy, by all means keep those memories. I have some, and I wish I had more. I wish there were more to go around in general. Some people had way better experiences than we did. Some people had only painful ones.
Aside from the next several paragraphs there’s not much more for us to say going forward about it. We’ll continue to deal with our end of it privately, as most everyone does. I do want to address one thing, though, a question we received several times in the past 2 months from fans of the game:
Wasn’t Alec just like Mae? Doesn’t your response go against the spirit of Night In The Woods? Do you not care about people with mental health issues?
I understand this question! It initially took me by surprise, since Mae was very much based on myself and Bethany and a couple other people we’ve known- Margaret, who was a grade ahead of me in high school (briefly, she was soon kicked out) and got into fights and was super cool, if very troubled. Amber, a friend of ours from a decade ago who angrily asked one day “why do we have to grow up???” as if it was an injustice. She played bass in a punk band. Both women were glorious dirtballs at the time, like a lot of people we love most. Mae’s dissociation issues were based on my own from childhood, as well as her depression stemming from both internal and external issues. I’d like to think I was a more mature and less pain-in-the-ass 20 year old but that’s probably wishful thinking. I did have the same cutoff jean shorts though. Art truly imitates life, and jorts.
But for a lot of people Mae is a broad symbol of mental health issues that interfere with life and relationships. And our rather blunt and unsentimental account of our difficult relationship with Alec might come off as in conflict with the story and themes of the game. But crucially the issue with Alec wasn’t that he had mental health and personality disorders. I’ve been pretty open about my own struggles, Bethany as well, and we’re surrounded by a great and wonderful host of people dealing with brains and learned behaviors and habits that don’t function as well as they should sometimes. The issue with Alec was power, and what he did with it.
Mae had a singular explosion of pretty extreme violence towards someone else when she was a child, and it scarred her (and him, most likely) and stopped her from growing up in a lot of ways. She wants to understand it and she knows the harm she did. And crucially, Mae doesn’t have power in any real sense, nor does she seek to gain and exert any over others. None of her friends rely on her for their livelihoods or security. Mae can’t hire or fire anyone, or put herself in the position where someone would have to endure whatever she threw at them in order to not have their lives upended. Mae had problems, but Mae didn’t do the things Alec did. For example- Night In The Woods, of all games, isn’t one that looks too kindly on bosses in general, let alone ones that make returning their romantic overtures a condition of employment. It isn’t one that looks kindly on people who abuse those with less power than them. Mae has very little power, and didn’t do the kinds of things Alec did. It would be a very different game if Mae was an abusive girlfriend, or boss, or someone with power over someone else. There’s a tooth floating around Night In The Woods that makes our stance on this kind of thing pretty clear.
Mae and Alec were alike in the sense that both had mental health problems, and Alec really connected with those aspects of Mae as he discovered them. But people with issues they didn’t ask for still do really shitty things. And while those issues can offer explanations for some of those shitty things, those things still are what they are. When we say we stand with abused people, and people with mental health issues (often the same people), we mean this. We stood by Alec during our time with him, partly out of real care and partly because he had the power to upend our lives. But we never stood by his actions, and we didn’t stand by them when the fuller scope of them became clear. Those things aren’t in conflict.
Mae and Alec were also different in that Alec had more options and help than just about any other person I’ve ever known who dealt with similar issues, and I have known a few. He had a whole lot of money, access to help and treatment, and a lot of folks around him who took it upon themselves to support him, giving him chance after chance for years, taking what he dished out, and eventually picking him back up again after he’d flame out. This isn’t meant to condemn Alec for being fortunate in having support, but just to say he was a guy who had more options and shielding than most people. More often people struggling with abuse, mental health problems, and personality disorders don’t have that, because they have no resources and no people around them and no way of avoiding very dire consequences. That’s something that desperately needs to change, but that is how it is at present. It’s certainly the reality we’re personally familiar with and it found its way into the game.
Mae has few resources with no access to good help for her mental health problems. Mae doesn’t have the financial means to solve or have much flexibility in regards to any of the big things happening to her and the people around her. And to be honest she is very young. We always refer to her as a young 20. But the age doesn’t matter so much. There’s plenty of hope for Mae. As far as I was concerned there was always hope for Alec, who was in his mid 30s and whose situation was about as different as could be from Mae’s. But Alec did what Alec did, right up to the end. It sucks. And it harmed a lot of people, not least of all himself. And it will continue doing so for a very long time.
I’m absolutely sure Alec did grow as a person and improve in some ways. He certainly seemed more stable and in control of some of his symptoms in recent years, at least as far as was visible to us. But the problems with Alec were his actions, often as someone with power over someone else. In that much more important sense, Mae and him were nothing alike. When NITW depicts that kind of power relationship, it’s not particularly subtle in its feelings on the matter.
One of the reasons I’ve since clarified Alec’s *huge* but more limited than publicly talked about role in NITW (initial enabler, coder with a whole lot of endurance, prolific composer, absolutely wild problem solver, sometimes pretty great collaborator) is that because we didn’t make all of that very clear up front, there are misconceptions about aspects of the game. And this is a game that has turned out to mean some very important and personal things to a lot of people, so this stuff turns out to actually matter. People think Mae was created or inspired in some way by Alec, and so what happened to him takes on some special resonance with her character, and therefore their own personal identification with her. But that isn’t the case, at least as far as our take on it goes.
Some folks have interpreted the song Die Anywhere Else as a personal cry for help, a foreshadowing for Alec’s death, when it was the product of a pretty fair amount of collaboration creatively. The title and much of the chorus, the treatment, etc- those came from others. We worked together. That’s one of so many examples. So how do you split that difference of who did what when you eventually need to because some bizarre and awful thing happened that colors the work itself, and therefore how people feel about what they’ve taken from it and its place in their lives? Alec did some amazing work on Die Anywhere Else! But others did just as much work on it. I was very bad at taking credit for things like that and thought that downplaying my own role in things that were more Alec’s realm would help him in his recovery. There are instances of this all over the game. And it didn’t really bother us too much, and until the past couple of months I never felt the need to clarify anything and it’s still very uncomfortable. Because we wanted to help. At the time I felt like it was for the greater good. In the end, it wasn’t. We tried our best to help Alec, because in some ways we had no choice, and because we also cared quite a bit about him even when he drove us literally to medical and psychiatric emergencies. He was a sweet guy and a complete terror. He did beautiful work and horrible things. As contradictory as that sounds, that’s not really all that uncommon to find. All you can do after the fact is try to tell the truth and hope it means something.
Like everything else in this situation, sometimes all of the options are bad, and beyond that they feel completely futile.
But to conclude where this started- Alec and Mae's situations aren't particularly similar once you get down to the very important details, at least as far as our view permitted. They never were meant to be alike. Alec discovered Mae much like anyone playing the game and connected with aspects of her, like many people did. NITW we hope demonstrates a great empathy for people (like us, who wrote it) who have brains and behaviors that can feel like they sabotage us, things that require a lot of attention, effort, and care to work with sometimes. Our problem with Alec was his actions, and the power dynamics involved. And NITW is I think pretty clear on where we land when it comes to that. I’d hope it is at least. Our intentions as creators don’t really matter much once the art leaves us and other people connect with it, but for what it’s worth those are our thoughts and experiences with Alec and with our favorite dirtball kid from around the corner, Mae Borowski. I sincerely think she’s on her way to something better. At the end of the game she’s in a place where she can perhaps go in that direction. After a song, and some pizza, and probably a good long sleep. There’s hope. There’s a future.
That’s my take, at least.
I don’t have much more to say about all of this. I can’t tell you how to feel about it, except to say that your experience with the game is yours, not ours. And we really and truly do appreciate that so many people have connected with the game, despite the circumstances of its creation. We appreciate that Alec’s contributions have meant so much to so many people. I hope good things continue to come from what we made. That’s something us and most certainly Alec himself would want. Do with that whatever feels best.
