EDITORIAL: The Meganode

July 29, 2010

by Eric-Jon Rössel Tairne

When I want to read Catch-22, what are the options? I can go to a library, and do it for free. While I’m there, I can browse the rest of his works or nearby, possibly similar, books. I can search by topic, author, or year of publication. If I want my own copy, I probably can find it at a nearby bookstore. Failing that, I can order it online for a pittance.

Thanks to Gutenberg, books are indexed and ageless. They may go out of print or become obscure, but one way or another you will always be able to find a copy. Then with a copy in hand, the only thing between you and their ideas is the work of digesting them.

How about if I want to watch Nosferatu — not the Werner Herzog one; the Murnau version? If I’m near an urban center, it may be showing at an indie theater or festival. If it’s October, I may track it down on a classic movie channel on cable. Or I can rent the DVD or VHS (or indeed borrow it from the library). If I go to a video store, there’s a good chance it’s in stock. Or, again, I can just hit up Amazon.

Ephemera

Much like books, films have found their posterity. Home video has certainly helped them on the way. Previously, particularly under the studio system, they were treated as ephemeral, throwaway experiences. Why worry about the old Clark Gable flick when there’s a new one running? If it was that memorable, why don’t the studios just remake it? Anyway, short of an expensive home projection system, how would you watch it?

Home video equipment is now cheap and standardized. Everyone has a TV and DVD or VHS player, or at least access to one. Netflix is ridiculously cheap, and carries everything except porn. This availability has opened the door to the restoration, documentation, and publication of archive films. Just recently researchers found the missing bits to Fritz Lang’s legendary 1927 film Metropolis, and the upcoming restored DVD is one of the most anticipated releases of 2010. You can put your DVD of Das Boot next to Halloween, next to The Dark Knight. There’s nothing stopping you, and there’s nothing strange about it. If it was filmed then chances are you can easily track it down and play it. Much as with books, all of the history of film is now current and all is relevant.

Until just a few years ago, TV had a similar problem to film. Most TV is, or has been, produced as disposable filler around commercials. Much early television was shot and broadcast live. Until the late 1970s the BBC regularly wiped its videotapes after broadcast, and burned any film copies when returned to them. Archive space was considered more valuable than the actual content being archived. Indeed, aside from the odd rerun or syndication deal most TV would run once and then sit on the shelf. Much as with the old studio system, the demand was always for new content.

There are still big problems with the format, but we now have enough patches and workarounds that broadcast TV is almost pointless. Previously if you missed an episode you would have to hope for a rerun or else shrug and move on. Now you just have to check your TiVo to sit back and watch a week’s worth of content — without the commercials. Or catch up on recent episodes, or indeed whole shows, on Netflix (again) or Hulu. If you want a hard copy, there will be a DVD set. Now it is completely normal to own a season of Supernatural, or even to skip the broadcasts and wait for the DVDs. This change in availability has begun to affect TV production, placing us in the middle of a creative boom.

Pursuit

Now, what if I want to play the original Asteroids? Or Ultima III? Or Jill of the Jungle? Or, heck, what if I just want to play the original Silent Hill?

Well. If all you’ve got is a current piece of hardware, your options are kind of limited. Without resorting to emulation or warez, good luck tracking down a copy of Ultima. And when you find a copy, good luck getting it to run on your modern PC. Maybe you can find a recent retro compilation that features Asteroids, or maybe there’s a remake for some download service.

Even Silent Hill, it’s only ten years old. This is one of the most important games of its era, and probably one of the best games ever made. Again you can buy the Wii remake, which isn’t quite the same. You may still have a PS2, or even an original PlayStation kicking around — though given Sony’s manufacturing history, it won’t last forever. Maybe Sony offers the game on its PS3 download service. I’m not going to check, because I don’t care. If it is available, it’s a special case.

I still have my NES, and my Master System, and my Sega Genesis. I made the effort to track down a Sega Saturn, even though I missed it the first time around. They all still work fine. How many consoles do I have plugged in? Aside from my Xbox 360, I’ve got my NES. I own Streets of Rage, but is it worth it to set everything up? And if I didn’t have the original equipment, I would have to settle for a Sega compilation — except most of those are for last generation’s platforms.

Videogames have it harder than other media because with no easy access to the past there is only ever a present. They are designed to specific, fleeting hardware configurations and the hardware is always changing. There is no centralized index of videogames, and if there were then stores only carry current software and libraries tend to approach games with caution.

It’s frustrating, as both on the creative and the user end understanding of game history and the way that one idea leads into another is spotty at best. People design and accept games like Twilight Princess not because they actually use the medium but because that’s the way they always remember games being designed, or because that is the current shape of the form. Yes, this game sort of reminds me of Ocarina of Time, which in turn sort of remembers me of Link to the Past, which reminds me of the original Legend of Zelda. It’s a little different now because there’s a wolf in it, and my arm gets tired.

Lip Service

When Nintendo first announced the Virtual Console, I felt a mix of relief and excitement. How wonderful, I thought, to have an archive of the bulk of console history — all in one place, easily accessible, in the mainstream eye. The implications seemed endless.

Now with the whole Zelda series available for comparison and contrast, Nintendo would have no excuse to keep remaking the game with slight changes. New games in a series could come with credits for their predecessors, so you could appreciate where they came from. Presumably a person could waste a whole afternoon browsing the Virtual Console for hidden gems. Every time the user booted up the system, the Virtual Console could suggest other games the user might like based on past preferences. Maybe previously obscure games would rise to the top of the pile, through social connections and pattern analysis, and gain a new recognition.

Well, none of that quite happened. Instead of a tabulated archive of gaming history, or even a sort of interactive wiki or Netflix/Amazon interface, we got an awkward store front shilling a select handful of overpriced ROMs, more or less without context. Granted a few obscure games have joined the roster, including a few that previously never enjoyed a worldwide release.

True to Nintendo form, the Virtual Console is both a brilliant idea and an enormous wasted opportunity. The idea of infinite reverse compatibility, freeing a medium from the constraints of hardware and availability and so rolling the history into the present, is… close to what we need. It’s not enough to offer the games for download; we need a framework: a deeply analytical indexing system.

Nodes

The pieces of a system like this, they’re out there. Aside from the Virtual Console and abandonware sites like Home of the Underdogs, we have indexing sites like Mobygames and GameFAQs and the Killer List of Video Games. Valve also comes to the fore again with Steam, which sort of aspires to collect and serve all your games in one place — indie games, classic shareware, and all. Yet none of these sites connects all the dots.

Another piece comes from the music node-exploring engine Liveplasma. Type in, say, Blondie, and you get a web of related artists. Artists who have some direct connection are linked by a line. The more connections, and the more influential the related artists, the bigger an artist’s bubble. What you will see is a sort of a star chart, with tight groupings of artists, each visually ranked by scale.

The ideal videogame index would work similarly — not necessarily the visual bubble thing that Liveplasma goes on; rather, it would focus on the webs that connect and contextualize forty years of design. If you were to search for The Legend of Zelda, you would get its release date (in various regions), its hardware configuration, its development staff, and lists of games that may have influenced Zelda, as well as games that it may have influenced — perhaps by various degrees. Pong would have influenced Space Invaders through Breakout!.

With all this data, it would be easy to chart and explore significant developments in design. If you’re looking at Double Dragon, you can check out what else was going on around its release date. You can chart its influence ranking amongst games by its creative director. You can put the database on a timeline and trace the most influential games through the 1980.

You also can flag or rate your favorite games, and through the wealth of connections (as well as your own past ratings) it can suggest for you other games that you may want to look at. And then it will offer a link to download the game, or to it purchase from, say, Amazon.

If I like Silent Hill, I may well enjoy D2 — and yet I may never have heard of it. The index would explain everything I need to play it, and offer links plus a total cost. Dreamcast? Check. VMU? Check. Based on that information, I could check or uncheck items from the list and put in an order. There we have it.

If available, the site could also offer review quotes or video clips; possibly information scraped from Wikipedia. If there are any interviews with Kenji Eno about his design of the game, perhaps include them too.

Let’s say I like Dragon Warrior and I dislike Final Fantasy. The game would trace games related to Dragon Warrior, and somewhat depreciate the links that also link to Final Fantasy. This shows that I have some discrimination, and don’t like like just any RPG. This may specialize the links, so that instead of Romancing SaGa I am linked to Lost in Blue. If I like Doom but dislike Quake, I may get links to Super Mario Bros. and Half-Life. If I like Quake but dislike Doom, I may get links to Unreal Tournament and Tribes. And I’ll be able to check them out either immediately or in a few days, with no hassle.

The Now

One of the major cultural and creative hurdles for videogames is a lack of permanence or history or posterity. It’s a self-fulfilling cycle. So long as the only games available are under six months old, it is hard to get a sense of the swamp of creativity that they crawled out of. The present simply exists in a bubble, and the past is old and outdated. The challenge is to fold the past into the present, and to to develop a constant present tense. Alex Kidd is just as much a part of the present as Kratos; the games are still there, and they still have things to say. He just isn’t getting as much attention at the moment. Yet maybe, if you like Phantasy Star and Super Mario Bros., he will present himself.

This is what we call conservation. It’s to make the sum of human experience available for present and future appreciation, and thereby to help us understand where we sit in the greater order. We can see mistakes repeated, and loose ends unexploited. We can see patterns and cycles and sudden epiphanies, and we come to understand how they occurred. And if there’s anything that the mainstream of videogames lacks, it’s self-awareness.