I met Richard Valentine nearly 30 years ago, when we were both students at a performing arts high school in a second-tier city. Richard was dark-eyed, small, and full of intense energy. Even then, I tended more toward the academic side; I couldn’t sing, was a mediocre pianist, and preferred talking to the music teachers and reading biographies of Thelonious Monk in the library to actually playing. Richard, on the other hand, couldn’t stop making things. Even in class (when he could be learning factual information from knowledgeable people! — which was the most exciting thing for me) he’d pretend to be taking notes, but he’d secretly be writing stories and sketching illustrations in his notebook. At lunch he’d walk around with a chintzy harmonica playing little blues riffs, or he’d take photos with a disposable camera. He never stopped moving, except on stage, where he would quiver silently as Biff or Don John — always cast in parts of disappointment and anger, the flavors he brought to everything he touched.

He was also deeply combative. Not physically — I never saw him throw a punch — but even when we were eighth graders and he was truly tiny (he was less than 100 lbs when we started high school, and he was still a sweet, high soprano until the summer between eighth and ninth grades) he’d stand toe-to-toe arguing with seniors over some stubborn point of . . . well, it varied, but usually theology or philosophy. I always thought Richard’s ardent love of the (resolutely cynical and materialistic) art world sat awkwardly alongside his intense and sometimes ascetic teenage Christianity. But to him, a profound experience with Horses or Solaris or Stacks of Wheat (End of Summer) — especially after a day of fasting and prayer — was just a way of accessing the mysticism he felt pulsing under the surface of mundane life.

His energy and intensity carried him a long way when he was still quite young. He moved to New York after high school and was almost immediately hired (based on his sketchbook and, I have no doubt, an insistent and over-the-top pitch to a bemused producer) as an assistant set designer for a studio that produced several minor daytime soap operas, including Regency House, Passion Island, and The Young Scions. After eight months he transitioned to assisting in the Scions writers’ room, which was fortunate, because he was already three months behind on timesheets in the art department.

He spent three years supporting the writers, keeping track of plot cards and distributing pages, and in his fourth year he was finally given an opportunity to contribute some scenes. He was assigned a thread about Morris the butler, whose forbidden-love colloquies with the Lady Evelyn were meant to provide a small but meaningful set of clues to the whereabouts of the Beckshire twins, who had been hidden away at birth. It was a simple thread, and Richard’s job was just to write a minor romance that facilitated plot exposition. This vote of confidence from the head writers should have been a welcome assignment, an opportunity to show off his basic chops and earn the right to take on more responsibility and, eventually, join the writers’ room as a full member.

What happened next is still a minor legend in soap-writing circles, though not in a good way: more an oogum-boogum cautionary tale for callow youths. Richard, as he has admitted to me, simply didn’t like the material — he found it stupid, unsophisticated, and beneath him. He concocted a plan to bury an Easter egg (or a bomb) inside his scenes. While the assignment was for him to drop certain geographical and temporal clues in Morris and Evelyn’s dialogue that would support the main plot about the long-hidden provenance of the twins, Richard decided to make the clues deliberately impossible — each individual piece would be plausible, but in totality the evidence would make it impossible for both twins to have come from the same family at the same time. An observant viewer could put together a reasonable path for one or the other of the twins to have come from the Beckshire manor, but not both. At this point, it would be clear that they must be doppelgängers who were not separated twins. “I was really into Raul Ruiz and Borges and Robbe-Grillet pretty hard,” he later told me, “and impossibility, mystery, and frustration seemed like the raison d’etre of art.” Given that the show only had scripts ready two to three weeks before production, he reasoned that he would be able to plant most of his clues into actual taped episodes before anyone else on the writing staff could put the pieces together.

This might have been an audacious move, or it might have been a complete fiasco. It might have divided fans. Or it might have gone completely unnoticed — a quiet thumb in the senseless eye of the Philistines, like Keith Carradine’s art forger in The Moderns selling fakes of valuable classics to John Lone’s crass businessman and keeping the real art for himself.

Instead, Richard fell apart entirely. “I wouldn’t call it writer’s block — I was writing all the time… walls of my apartment just plastered with pages and index cards.” But he couldn’t make it work. The complexity of the undertaking overwhelmed him, and he found that he couldn’t get the puzzle right given all the other elements of the story already in place. He spent two months trying to put together seven short Morris/Evelyn scenes and wrote hundreds of pages… none of which could be turned in. Many writers, from SNL comedians to Aaron Sorkin, have leaned on cocaine and the sheer terror of a looming deadline to get them past this point. Richard did not use drugs. And the terror made him crawl up the walls… but it did not create even the semblance of a useable draft.

When his first pages were due and he came up empty-handed, he was sent back to his desk outside the writers’ room and two senior writers pounded out his scenes in a weekend. (Their geographical and temporal clues also didn’t make much sense, albeit likely from fatigue rather than any sort of F for Fake art-prank impulses.)

Richard was replaced a few weeks later.

He moved to Chicago and bummed around the South Side, falling in with a gang of highly theory-oriented University of Chicago MFA students. Occasionally homeless, he often slept in odd nooks in the art building, an old, ramshackle studio that once housed the apprentices of sculptor Lorado Taft. After a series of lunches with faculty member and conceptual artist Robert Peters, he also began working with independent computer game designers. Richard had no computer skills to speak of, but he was able to teach himself the very limited coding needed to develop a simple text game that he called Civilization.

Civilization is barely even a game. It simply presents you with a scenario, chosen at random by the game from a bank of annoying and frustrating scenarios, and asks you to make a moral choice. Some scenarios are bare-bones; others get a little more flesh. But it’s always the same moral choice—Civilization always just asks if you would like to commit an unjustifiable murder.

For example:

You are standing at a streetcorner waiting for the light to change. The street is filthy and the gutters are full of trash. The man next to you throws a cigarette on the ground in front of you.

Grab his head and smash it into the light pole? [Y/N]

Or:

You are in your car in the grocery store parking lot. It’s hot and you can’t run the air conditioning; there is ice cream melting in the bag next to you. Just as you start your car, a teenager in a yellow vest drives a train of shopping carts by your rear bumper, blocking you in. She is short, pretty, thoughtless. She stops the cart-mule and talks to a friend. Your engine idles noisily. She laughs and her laughter is infectious. It’s been years since you laughed like that.

Throw the car in reverse and smash right into her and her cart-mule? [Y/N]

Or:

You are in your car, driving in the right lane on a busy street. A car to your left is going the same speed. Ahead you see parked cars in your lane, so you speed up to get ahead of the car on the left. But the car on the left also speeds up, preventing you from getting over and forcing you to slam on the brakes and drop back.

At the end of the block, you are directly behind the car that wouldn’t let you over. You have a tire iron in the car.

Get out and bash the other driver’s head with the tire iron? [Y/N]

Or:

You move across the country for a new job. During the move, all your things are destroyed in a truck fire. You’re extremely lonely. The job is all you have.

At work, a woman who is your age but technically outranks you starts to undermine you at every turn. She belittles your ideas and repeatedly sends your work back. After a while you figure out that she has a protege who could move into your position if you weren’t in it. The protege wears these shoes with little bright gold buckles. You hate those shoes. You can tell that people are starting to lose patience with you. You can tell you your supply of chances is running low. And this is the kind of job where you don’t get another one if you get let go too soon.

One night it’s late and you’ve been spending too much time on your work, trying to make it perfect, trying to make it bulletproof—as if the problem is you. Leaving, you see a flash of gold under a desk; the protege is still in her office. You are standing by your secretary’s desk. She is very into Renaissance Festival and the Society for Creative Anachronism; next to your left hand is a humorous letter opener shaped like a jeweled dagger.

Stab? [Y/N]

The game was a commercial failure even in the fairly tiny market for experimental, high-concept text adventure games. Partly this was because of an unnecessary dispute with MicroProse over the name Civilization. (Readers may recall a substantially more famous game of the same name.) But mostly it was because people found the game off-putting on a number of levels. At the most basic level, it didn’t really offer much reward. The early 2000s certainly offered its share of violent computer games, but most of those games were about the thrill of actually engaging in violence. Civilization doesn’t offer satisfying explosions of blood or bad guys going “aaaaagh!” Each round of the game ends with the moral choice. The A/V Club, in a slightly exasperated review, called it an “anti-game with no payoffs or pleasure. At best it’s an opportunity for introspection. But I suspect that the people who need this kind of introspection — the volcanically angry, the ones teetering on the edge of violence in their own lives — would be too frustrated and annoyed to sit through whatever didactic lesson this is supposed to be teaching. And for the rest of us, the choices are too easy: of course we are not going to kill taxi drivers or overly aggressive Mormon missionaries. We don’t even want to.”

Several other critics, like Leigh Alexander and Chris Dahlen, also pointed out that some of the imagery was disturbingly freighted with implications of racial and sexual animosity. I interviewed Richard for LifeForms magazine and pushed him on this point — a point to which he was not particularly receptive:

WG: I wanted to talk about some of the criticisms the game has been getting.

RV: Oh boy. Here we go. Okay.

WG: Well, look — somebody analyzed all the scenarios in the game and found that almost 60 percent of the victims are women.

RV: Okay…. [long pause] Wally, there are five hundred different scenarios. I didn’t index it like that. I was just trying to imagine scenarios where people would be angry or triggered.

WG: Right, so… think about that. You sat down and thought about people being mad, and by a three-to-two margin you thought they would be mad at women.

RV: Okay.

WG: There are other things people have brought up.

RV: Like what?

WG: Well, the A/V Club review —

RV: I read that.

WG: So —

RV: Well, they didn’t understand the point of the game.

WG: What’s the point of the game?

RV: It’s not “didactic” — it’s celebratory. It’s not about… it’s not a fucking anger management course. We’re already managing our anger. It’s about how every day we go out there and things are shit and people are shit, even in the smallest, littlest things they can’t manage to be good. It’s a nightmare. Reality is this unbelievably nihilistic proposition. Nobody’s enforcing the good, nobody’s making us be better. And yet, somehow… I don’t know… we forgive each other. We forgive each other all of these sins, you know? Look, we’re all horrible, egregious sinners, every minute of every day. And yet we all forgive each other, almost all of the time. Not perfectly, but holy shit. This is amazing!

WG: Do you think people really forgive each other, though? Or is it just that people are afraid of being arrested?

RV: Come on — I’m not being naive. I know a lot of it is social conditioning. But that’s why it’s called Civilization — that’s why I wanted that title. Because, okay, yeah — individually we probably often just forgive each other because society tells us to. Society tells us to be nice. Society tells us to forbear from violence, so we do. Maybe out of fear of punishment, or maybe just because we feel shame that we aren’t living up to the social norm we believe everyone believes in. But that’s the point. That’s the point, because collectively we’ve forgiven each other. We’ve said, “All this terrible, shitty moral failure that is most of human life… eh. We’re gonna shrug that off.” We’ve made a decision that there’s only a few times you can kill somebody, even though people are just awful, all the time. That’s an amazing and beautiful and sublime thing.

And the situations in which we think it’s okay to kill someone are getting smaller and smaller. Just a couple of generations ago the law still basically said you could kill someone for sleeping with your wife. You couldn’t get away with that completely, but it was just manslaughter instead of murder. That’s a harder case to make now, and it’s getting harder still. I think we might eventually get to a place where even self-defense is off limits. But the death penalty would be, too!

WG: Let me read you another one of your scenarios:

You have been highly sensitive to sounds in your environment since you returned from the war. Your neighbor likes to play loud music, the thudding, one-bass-hit-every-few-seconds kind. One night, after about seven hours of this, your spouse goes next door to ask them to turn it down. You stand in the doorway of your own house. The guy who comes to the door looks at you both with a mix of scorn and annoyance and anxiety. The music level drops for a while, but then it creeps back up again.

Get your gun down from the closet and go next door? [Y/N]

I mean, Richard, some of this veers into “Falling Down” territory.

RV: Wally, you’re assuming the murderer isn’t black, or a woman, or whatever. You’re playing this from the perspective of —

WG: I’m playing it from the default perspective. And I think you know what that is.

RV: That’s what you’re bringing to it!

WG: That’s what everybody brings to it! And it’s your job, as the artist, to know what people will bring with them. That, first of all, people will assume it’s you. Second, they will assume the player character is white and male unless you tell them otherwise. And third, they will assume, in this society — that you live in — that the neighbor is black and the murderer is white and you’re murdering them for playing rap music. Come on!

RV: Wally, do you really think a black person was never driven nuts by their neighbor’s loud music? Really?

WG: Oh my God. I feel like you might be missing the point.

RV: Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa…. [getting up and pacing around the room] aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa… [far from the mic] aaaaaaaaaaaagh!

WG: Goddammit….

It was a difficult interview. It’s hard to interview friends.

* * *

I actually believed him when he said the game was about bigger issues for all humans. And I believe that he worked hard to try to imagine as many scenarios for as many of those humans as he could think of. Here’s another one that didn’t get talked about as much:

You are in a play. The director is someone you admire. When he gives notes, he touches you — often aggressively, challengingly. You never enjoy it — and, worse, it does not actually give you the jolt of authenticity that he seems to think it will. (Often the rest of the rehearsal is just an act.) It just feels… bad. The fact that he makes you feel bad makes you try to please him more. Your trying does not work, nor does it stop the touching. Your performances become manic and jerky whenever he’s in the theater. You know this is killing your craft, and so you start finding excuses to hold private rehearsals with other actors, away from the theater, in order to get better at your scenes. The other actors won’t go along with it much more, though.

One night, he catches you alone at the top of the stairs backstage. No one else is around. He grabs your arm firmly and begins talking to you about changes to the blocking in the third scene. He is too close, demanding, overbearing. No one else is around.

Turn your body quickly, throwing him off balance and tossing him down the stairs? [Y/N]

That doesn’t change the problems I have with some of the other ones. But there’s a larger whole here.

In a way, Civilization was a bad bet for a writer: 500 short stories, written in less than a year. Ordinarily a writer might publish that many stories in a lifetime, gaining wisdom and rolling with various tides of public opinion. Or… your most famous work could be 500 snapshots taken one imperfect moment, blown up and intensified by sheer repetition.

Richard told me (much, much later) that the game was “really a desperate stab at figuring things out as faith was beginning to lose its grip on me.” He grew up in one of those little churches where you know everybody and every event you perceive, large or small, is a sign. “Improbably, God is shaping world events, weather, traffic, and the number and type of bagels left at the grocery store on a given afternoon entirely for the benefit of this handful of people — who are less than a rounding error in the world’s population. It’s an insane worldview — but it’s hard to give up, you know?

“And you lose it on the micro and the macro level all at once: you lose these people, who you love, who are more beautiful than human because you see God in them. And you lose your relationship with the universe. Light isn’t bent around stars for you anymore. It’s a long, slow, deep grief, I think, that you never fully get over. And I was trying to make some sense of that, to find something good in the world now that love was gone.”

I asked him what he thought of the game now, with many years of distance.

“I think I succeeded, actually — I’m still very proud of that work. But I would do it differently now. Not just the stuff you and others picked out, although that’s important. When I look back on the game, I think the real problem isn't just that I was sexist or racist -- although, you know, I probably was. But that's just a subset of an inability to imagine the experiences of these other people — and that's the core artistic failure, right? I didn't exercise a complete imagination of the world I was creating. It was partial. It was half-done. Half-done because I was busy making a didactic point -- and I still think that point was worth making! Wally, I still think there's a miracle of self-control and forgiveness going on around us, all the time, that we don't acknowledge. But now I think I'd try to round it out — let the player experience each scenario from different viewpoints. The perspective of the wrongdoers, the people who make you want to kill them. To show the player, not just that they can give grace — that was the point of the original game — but that they can receive it, too.”

* * *

Richard left behind creative professions after Civilization. He moved to Ohio and worked his way up to a managerial job with a large insurance company. He got married and had a kid. I didn’t hear from him for over a decade.

* * *

I should have guessed he wouldn’t have stopped creating, though. “I know it’s not my job, isn’t ever going to be my job again,” he said in an email last month. “I’m a mid-level VP in an insurance company. That’s what I am. This is just something I do. You know?”

It seemed like a pleading note. But he sent me this album, and it’s just as perverse, and as earnest, as all the rest of his work.

It’s just shy of forty minutes, only 5 songs, one of which is a 19-minute… radio play…? It was made entirely with Korg’s DX7 clone and a single drum machine — even the backing vocals in “Acid” are synthesized. (There is one live-human sample on “The Bitter Pith.”) So the album shares a lot sonic elements with 80s-retro synthwave, albeit lacking the neon gloss and cybernetic cool of that genre. This music sounds hot and pushed to the limits, with unpolished vocals floating over and around distorted drums and digital chaos. Starting with a series of slow, reversed cymbal crashes making a wash of hissy, top-end noise, chirrups and glitches and abrupt stops mingle with cop show basslines, fake organs, sweeping brass pads, and moans and whistles from the Star Trek bridge. Thematically and lyrically it reminds me of MC 900 Ft. Jesus, with references to demon possession, hell, and/or some light schizophrenia. As ever with Richard, it’s so prickly and off-putting that I fear no one will notice that he’s secretly trying to offer something he finds beautiful.

“I know what you mean,” he told me when I called him back, “but it’s not like I set out to do that. I’m actually always trying to make pop art. I’d be delighted to wake up one day and make a Jonas Brothers track. It just… doesn’t work out. This is what comes out of me instead. I don’t know. Somehow when I’m making it I always think, oh, people will really connect with references to dead Puritans!” He laughed. “I could at least have used Lizzie Proctor, the one name everybody knows. But no.” I laughed, too. We’re older now.

“I know to some extent I’m retreading the same ground — I’m still obsessed with what it means to be without God. And, maybe this is more important, how to live without being in communion with your co-religionists. I really miss that. But at the same time, I think, you know, I still think what I did when I made Civilization — there’s something fragile and wondrous in this moment that we’re alive without God. ‘Seeds’ is, you know, a more aggressive re-working of the same idea. What if there’s no God, but there is hell? What if it’s the worst-case scenario — just a terrible, painful, sad life followed by an even worse afterlife? Doesn’t that inspire you to be gentler, kinder, more loving with the time you have? I don’t know — that was my feeling.”

Is he going to make more music? “I doubt it. I sort of think there’s too much music already. And too much value placed on artists making lots of new content. Why should you? What if you only have five songs in you?”

I ask if that contradicts what he says in “Seeds,” where the narrator observes that songs get worn out as you listen to them over and over again. Don’t we need to seek out new content?”

“No, I don't think it's a contradiction. I think it's the point. Very much the point. Because in an earlier age — anytime before our parents’ lifetimes, really — we would have had fewer songs, but the songs would have been in an appropriate context. You'd sing a dirge a funeral, not just going about your ordinary life. I think there's been a real dilution of the experience of interacting with great art. You shouldn't listen to Bowie when you're creating a spreadsheet. It shouldn’t just be something you hum along to. ‘Nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh, back to Suffragette City, doing my taxes…’ Pay attention! Look, this is a silly example, but you don't sing ‘Happy Birthday’ except at birthday parties, right? That's all I'm saying -- there's a time and place for everything. We should keep precious things precious.”

“Do you listen to Bowie while making spreadsheets?”

“Of course! Wally, the nice thing about being our age is that I can finally admit: I'm just as much of a failure as everybody else."