Posted by Athena Scalzi
https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/02/17/the-big-idea-darby-mcdevitt/
https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59493
The intentions behind one’s actions speaks louder than words ever could. Author Darby McDevitt leads us on a journey through the exploration of intention, desires, and consequences in the Big Idea for his newest novel, The Halter. Take the path he has laid out for you, if you so desire.
DARBY MCDEVITT:
Many years ago I worked for a video game company in Seattle that shoveled out products at a rate of four to six games per year. Most of these were middling titles, commissioned by publishers to fill a narrow market gap and slapped together in six to nine months by teams of a dozen or two crunch-weary developers. We worked hard and fast, with passion and determination, but the end results never quite equaled the ambitions we had.
A common joke around the office, told at the end of every draining development cycle, went like this: “Sure, the game isn’t fun, but the design documents are amazing.” The idea of offering consumers our unrealized blueprints in lieu of a polished game was ridiculous, of course, but it came from a place of real desperation. We wanted our players to know that, despite the poor quality of the final product, we really tried.
The novelist Iris Murdoch has a saying that I repeat often as a mantra, always to guard against future disappointment: “Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea.” Here again is the notion of a Platonic ideal at war with its hazy shadow. How familiar all this is. Experience tells us that people falling short of their ideals is the natural course of life. We never live up to the best of our intentions.
In my new novel, The Halter, I compare this process of “intension erosion” to the more upbeat phenomenon of Desire Lines – footpaths worn over grassy lawns out of an unconscious need for efficiency. Desire lines appear wherever the original constraints of an intentionally designed geographic space don’t conform with the immediate needs of the men and women walking through it. In video games we use a related term – Min-Maxing – the act of looking for ways to put in a minimum amount of effort for maximum benefit. In both cases, the original, ideal use of a space or system is superseded by a desire for efficiency.
In The Halter, these same principles take hold on a grand scale inside an idealized “surrogate reality” metaverse called The Forum, where artists, scientists, and thinkers from all disciplines are invited to probe the deepest and most difficult aspects of human behavior and society. One Forum designer creates a so-called theater to explore the tricky business of language acquisition by sequestering one-hundred virtual babies together with no adult interaction. Another theater offers visitors a perfect digital copy of themselves as a companion, as a therapeutic approach to self-discovery. A third lets visitors don the guise of any other individual on earth so they may literally fulfill the empathetic idiom of “walking a mile in another man’s shoes.”
Noble intentions, arguably – yet in every case, after repeated exposure to actual human users, each theater devolves into something less than the sum of its parts. A prurient playground, or an amusing distraction, or a mindless entertainment. Shortcuts are taken, efficiencies are found, novel-uses imposed. The empathy theater is transformed into a celebrity-fueled bacchanalia; the digital doppelganger becomes a personal punching bag. The baby creche, a zoo. Each and every time, execution falls short of intention. Each theater crumbles, becoming a wreck of its original, perfect idea … and audiences are riveted.
The phenomena described here are common enough that several terms encompass them, each one differentiated for the situation at hand. Desire paths were my first exposure to the concept. The CIA calls it Blowback, when the side effects of a covert operation lead to disastrous results. Unintended Consequences and Knock-On Effects are cozier names, both of which can yield positive or negative results. And a Perverse Incentive is the related idea that the design of a system may be such that it encourages behavior contrary to its intended purpose. Taken together we begin to see the shape of the iceberg that wrecks so many perfect ideas.
I wrote The Halter to explore the highs and lows of these effects, and to shed light from a safe distance on the invisible forces that push and pull constantly at our behavior, often without our knowledge or consent. At one point in the middle of the novel, a collection of idealistic designers, most of whom have given years of their lives to the Forum designing and testing theaters of varying utility, commiserate on what they feel has been a collective failure. Their beloved theaters, they fret, have been co-opted and corrupted by The Forum visitors who have no incentive to behave or play along – they simply show up and engage in the simplest and most efficient way possible. How sad. How crushing. If only these morose designers could share their original design documents….
Their folly, in my view, was to treat their original intentions as merely a point of inspiration and not a goal to be achieved. Their error was to abandon their work in the face of a careless, sleepwalking opposition. The heroic path forward requires vigilance, not surrender, and if an outcome is unexpected, unwarranted, or undesirable, it may be more productive to tweak the inputs than blame the user.
We mustn’t fret that our perfect idea is laying at the bottom of the sea, five fathoms deep. We mustn’t fetishize our design documents – be it a holy book, an artwork, a game, a manifesto, or the U.S. Constitution – because design documents are merely static pleas for unrealized future intentions. They can always be corrupted, upended, misinterpreted. Have faith and patience. The hopeful paths are yet unmade, lying in wait for a thousand shuffling feet to score the way forward.
The Halter: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s
Author socials: Website|Bluesky|Facebook
https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/02/17/the-big-idea-darby-mcdevitt/
https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=59493
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