Yearly Archives: 2016

Hostile Mythology

  • Reading time:2 mins read

The more I think about it, the more I like about the premise of Class as well. It’s like tragically, grimly accidental continuity.

Coal Hill is just this school, in a formerly working class, quickly gentrifying area of London. Full of kids, teachers, living their lives. But, a jerk in a time machine has punched enough holes in the universe that unspeakable horrors have begun to pour in.

So the school has turned into a place of incomprehensible danger and fear, that people have no rational way of quantifying. What can you do? Put up a memorial to the dead and the vanished, renovate and modernize, try to rationalize, try to keep living. But everyone knows. What had just been a normal school has turned into an urban legend, a place of dread… that still remains in operation.

What had randomly been the location for Doctor Who’s first episode, then a subtle continuity touchstone for decades, is now a character. Coal Hill has become mythologized in its own right, as a casualty of the cavalier adventure narrative of the parent show.

And into that mythology step a few brighter-than-average kids, who through it face horrors they are unequipped to cope with. THANKS DOCTOR.

coal-hill

When you see the Coal Hill emblem now, it comes not just with dry geeky recognition but with a sense of living menace. It has been corrupted. What had been benign, slightly wonky continuity has become a hostile mythology. It has taken on its own life, and that life is tragic.

A-Level English

  • Reading time:5 mins read

As a writer, Patrick Ness regularly emphasizes the words that we’re using and the weight that we give them. In episode one, Ram’s father interjects about his son’s sloppy word choice.

RAM: Oh, my God! If you tell me one more time, I might literally go insane.
VARUN: Don’t abuse the word literally. It’s a good word that young people squander.

Note that he doesn’t criticize Ram’s misuse of the word; rather, the lack of consideration that seemed to go into its selection. The point isn’t a prescriptive approach to language, but rather a deliberate one.

In the case of this show, I think the most important word may be its title, Class. I think that the conflicts in the end will be less a matter of malevolence than about the consequences of righteousness and entitlement.

There are some key elements that the show has set up already: Charlie’s justified attitude toward slavery; his imperiousness when questioned on it by Tanya; that telling early moment where Ram asks him why he sounds like the Queen; his detachment, that initially we read as dorky obliviousness, upon walking into the conflict of Matteusz’s family; his calm and calculation in bringing the Cabinet with him, and in his following demeanor — on which Quill checks him in the first episode; the failure of the… whatsit in episode three to tempt him with visions of his parents.

I’m starting even to question his actions in slapping away April’s hand when she shoots at Corakinus. He justifies it by saying he hesitates in killing a friend, but at that point he hasn’t really done much to suggest he thinks that much about April. Really, his whole attitude toward the others is genial but disinterested. He’s fascinated with them, particularly with Matteusz, but they’re just tools to entertain him while he bides his time.

What have I been waiting for?
Been wasting all my time,
Watching my youth slip away
Surely is a crime.

It’s not that Charlie is an evil, malicious person out to do harm. It’s a matter of class. As Charlie loves to remind everyone, he is a prince. He is above everyone and everything, and he has his entitlement. Whatever he does, it is just — because of who and what he is. He simply is better than everyone. It’s the way he was raised, and it plays deeply into his understanding of the world. Within that framework he’s easygoing and pleasant enough, and seems willing to listen to others and entertain their views to a point. But, he’s not even the same species as these people.

To that end, it’s a little unclear what his motivation might be, but it is telling that he has this box on Earth that can in effect empty out all of the people on the planet and replace them with his own people. He’s already wearing a human skin, so it’s not like the concept is that much of a leap for him.

The issue about his parents, we can read a few ways. The initial viewing gives us a sad sentimental glow; he was the poor little royal boy who nobody really loved except as a tool (aside: how might that have affected his views of others?), and here he’s found a real family. Take another look, and we see that maybe he doesn’t miss his parents because he has a plan and he’s not so bothered that they’re gone for the moment. Dwell a bit more, and you start to wonder if the Shadow Kin were on his planet altogether by their own device. Did he play some part in orchestrating what happened? Is there a strategic reason why he might want Corakinus around?

I’m not sure that the story will go as far as that, but I think it’s becoming clear that the big turmoil in this show is going to be around Charlie’s ethics and his decisions about who he wants to be, what he cares about, how he wants to behave. And I don’t think he’s going to come to (what we would consider) the right decision very easily. “Nice” he may be, as with April, but he’s not exactly kind. It’s not natural for him to relate to others as equals. And it may take something big to force him to accept that leap.

Probably involving a few slaps from Quill.

Afterthought: Most of the sense in the main cast comes from the people of color, and the immigrant boyfriend. In the first episode Ram and Tanya joke about how glad they are to talk about something other than what the white people are up to. Ram is clearly the main character of the show; he is most affected by what’s happening around him, and goes on the most visible personal journey. The first episode opens to Ram, engaging Charlie in petty conflict — or rather, Charlie being lightly “terrorized” by Ram (see his excuse about the Quill) — and that conflict continues for some time.

Even in episode two Ram is reluctant to get involved with the chosen ones, a status that he scorns yet Charlie wears more naturally than his human skin. This really all is happening because the Doctor plopped Charlie down in the middle of Shoreditch, and being an alien — a royal alien, at that — he’s pretty tranquil about the whole thing.

So, yeah, Charlie is a problem. That’s going to be the big thing to unpack by the end of the season.

The Nintendo S-Box

  • Reading time:2 mins read

I just read a question that I find strange. Someone wanted to know the best NES games, with the understanding that most of the big ones would be superseded by later, better remakes. It was pointless to play Metroid, for instance, though maybe the first Zelda did a few unique things. Were there any games that were still worth playing?

The reason I find this strange is that the approach seems so askew. The reason to go to NES games will be less in terms of what they have to offer mechanically from a contemporary perspective; the main appeal here will be their method. It’s in the look, the sound, the technical limitations that result in the problem-solving that forms the basis of most of the design.

The most interesting things that you’ll find here are informed by these ephemera of a context that doesn’t exist anywhere else. Metroid isn’t interesting on the NES because of the shape of its world or what the buttons do; it’s because the game is both glitchy as fuck and designed so that most of its genuine surprises come off like possible glitches. The experience of playing the game feeds from a sort of cognitive dissonance between what you’re seeing and what might be, that creates a sense of endless possibility.

The best NES games feed into that dissonance, to create an idea that anything could be out there.

I guess I mean to say that the experience of the NES is one of uncertainty. The system is like a Schrodinger’s Box. Nothing is clearly defined except in the moment of experience — a moment that for all you know may never be recaptured.

  • Why do the rocks in Zelda look like turtles?
  • Wait, there’s a second quest? Where the world has different rules?!
  • Could there be another world entirely, if you burn the right bush?
  • Can you get to the end of the minus world?
  • What exists outside the normal Metroid levels?
  • Can you hit Deborah’s Cliff with your head?
    • Super Mario Bros. a third time?
  • What happens if you climb off the screen?
  • Am I meant to be able to do the thing I’m doing?

It’s childhood myth and legend encoded in inconclusive living hieroglyphics. Whispers in the night. Nightmares in silicon, filtered through corroded contacts, coaxial cable, and the roughly traced path of an electron gun.

Back then it was very hard to pass judgment on what was a “good” or a “bad” game; it was more that some things were more opaque than others, and better at hiding their secrets.

And then you get to the chaos wrought by the Game Genie, which at first wasn’t exclusively a cheating device — it was a hacking device, allowing you to fundamentally alter the experience of playing. Make Mario walk backwards. Be Small Firey Mario at any time! Make the entire world black, so you have to feel your way around…

To that end, Simon’s Quest is one of the most definitive NES games. It is pure ambiguity, obfuscation, and interpretation from start to end. It even has three endings, to enhance the what-might-be.

I should make a list of the definitive NES experiences, in the sense of those games that most embody the uncertainty that we have so dearly lost over the years.

The Return of Samus, But Hold the Uterus

  • Reading time:8 mins read

As with many recent posts, this isn’t going to go in deep; I’m retreading a Twitter rant/discussion, with a bit of framing information so that it makes sense as a block of prose.

So there’s this Metroid II remake project that just finished. I’ve seen progress before, and dismissed it on the basis that it seemed to miss the point of the original almost entirely. It looked like the idea behind the project was that Metroid II was the “bad” game in the series, or at least the one that didn’t match the others, and that for anyone to enjoy the game it ought to be brought up to the standard of Super Metroid or Zero Mission (a remake of the first Metroid, made to look and play more like Super Metroid).

This is… kind of an offensive way of thinking, no matter what subject we’re talking about; that the nail that sticks up has to be knocked down, that the strange voices have to conform, that everything needs to be of a sameness. That the game in question is actually one of my personal favorites, one of the most expressive and artistic games that Nintendo has ever published, makes the project all the more irritating.

What it looked like they were doing was stripping out all of the atmosphere, the tension, the thematic intensity that made the game worth playing in the first place, under the misapprehension that all of this was a flaw because it made the game strange and difficult to play. Every game should play like Super Metroid, especially another Metroid game — and the first game has already been “fixed” to match, so that just leaves the one everyone hates. Let’s try to change their minds by turning it into another bouncy chapter of the Samus Zappy Puzzle Room Adventure.

So — and here’s where the tweet storm starts, I relented and I played it. A little of it, anyway. It really is very well-made, as fundamentally misguided as it may be. That said, I tuned out when it started to insert random puzzles.

Because it absolutely has to have the fucking shinespark, I guess (a convoluted ability introduced in Super Metroid that fans have taken, er, a shine to), we now have a charge beam as the second pick-up — which totally changes the focus of the narrative. Originally, you got the bomb, and then the Spider-Ball, because this is of fundamental importance. It’s pretty much what the whole game is about.

Now, the Spider-Ball comes almost incidentally, in an afterthought chamber after the big reveal of the charge beam and lots of distracting puzzles that take away from the significance of the event.

The charge beam is just one of many features from later Metroid games retrospectively crammed into here for no reason other than that people liked them. The idea being that game design is a constant march of progress, and this game was dated — so let’s incorporate all of our modern concessions. Let’s let the player grab ledges! Does it fit what the game is out to accomplish? Don’t understand the question; why wouldn’t we put it in?

Now. I haven’t played too far yet, but on the basis of what I’ve played… for all of this laboring the game with later concepts that it doesn’t need, I bet they missed a thing. I can’t verify if it’s in there, but it seems unimaginable to me to revisit Metroid II now and not reference the X parasite.

The X parasite was introduced in the fourth Metroid Game, Metroid Fusion. That game revealed that the player did a very bad thing back in Metroid II, by wiping out all the Metroids. As it turned out, over the course of that game Samus totally unbalanced the ecosystem, allowing a much worse threat to take hold. As that game began, Samus even paid for the mistake with… not her life, exactly, but her being. To save her from the X parasite, she had to be infused with Metroid DNA. Her old armor had to be physically cut away. Basically, she would never be the same again.

So if I were remaking Metroid II, you can bet I’d keep this development in mind. You couldn’t make a big deal about it, but for people who knew what they were looking at, some foreshadowing would be obvious. Considering that these guys are basically upgrading Metroid II to play like Fusion (by way of Zero Mission), you’d think they’d pay attention to the game’s greater narrative significance. And yet, something tells me the thematic development is going to be pretty low here. In messing with the flow leading up to the Spider-Ball, they’ve already diluted the first major beat.

The whole game is supposed to be womblike. The Spider-Ball and final Metroid egg (which the player first rolls past in ball form, emphasizing a similarity between Samus and the egg — and then which hatches in the game’s final moments, leaving one last Metroid alive and imprinted on Samus as its mother) just being obvious facets of that. This being the game where Samus finds her compassion and becomes a “mother” is not a coincidence. The womblike way you hold the game, the claustrophobic display, the dark, the atmospheric soundtrack.

I mean, the whole story is about the Metroid queen and her babies, about hatching. You spend most of the game in ball form. You can keep picking away; the metaphor extends as far as you want it to.

Here, they’ve basically stripped the progesterone out of the game and turned it into a dur-dur zappy puzzle adventure. So, no, I don’t think that thematic resonance is high on the list of concerns. But if you were to go the sensitive route, and do a remake that emphasized and further explored the game’s original themes, then having that retrospective concern about genocide and ecological destruction and unforeseen consequences would make the discussion even deeper. It’s not the immediate point of the adventure, and it can’t be, but seeding in the occasional overt hint would be nice.

Imagine a version of Metroid with the building suggestion that You Are Fucking This Up, that you shouldn’t be doing this, that this is wrong. That would be welcome. Shadow of the Colossus was 12 years ago now. You know what came out 13 years before Shadow of the Colossus? Metroid II. You know how long ago Zero Mission came out? Also twelve years ago. Some fucking selective education in this system here.

Game design isn’t an objective thing, and there is no such thing as progress except in our growing understanding of how design mechanics can be used to express ideas. Game design means nothing in and of itself, and its application as an intellectual exercise or a means to entertainment only makes the most facile use of the potential for material betterment available to us through forty years of study and (often ineffectual) experimentation.

Ultimately, though, this remake is just one take on an existing story. It won’t supplant the original. The mentality guiding the remake is troublesome, but it is on its way out. Other perspectives are available, and many enlightened ones have made themselves heard over the last decade or so.

Though there’s no real need to revisit Metroid II, I can see an advantage to calling back to its affect — on what the game actually does, artistically; what it serves to communicate. We have the tools now to convey this all more clearly. Any such emphasis would help to underline the greatness in the original work, to make it easier to appreciate. In the process, there’s also a bunch to learn for future work.

So, here’s an idea. What about a game jam? How about a bunch of voices get together to trade alternative readings of Metroid II. Give their own concerted personal interpretations, emphasizing their own themes. Draw on the contrast between experiences.

That’s probably the way forward. Despite what this remake would serve to insist, there’s no one truth to be had. There are no Platonic forms. Our experiences are what make us what we are, and in the end that’s all that we have to say for our lives. So, we might as well respect our individual experiences for what we are. That’s the only way we’ll ever grow, ever achieve something great as a people — by acknowledging the limits of our own two eyes in our own skulls. If we want to expand our views, we need to pool our resources. Every perspective we accept makes us richer, makes us better, makes us wiser, makes us more kind.

All of which videogames could use.

Corrosion and Sparks

  • Reading time:5 mins read

(The following is based on my portion of a Twitter conversation with John Thyer, Amandeep Jutla, and Thom Moyles.)

Weirdly, I think The King of Fighters is another half-decent example of this sort of design. There is a huge, multifaceted story underneath each game, going back years; dozens of perspectives. Most of that comes out through the way the characters animate, how they respond to each other, and little bits of action and dialogue scattered through the series, with only scant exposition.

As with Phantasy Star II or Riven, your part is to take what you’re shown and work out all the implications; figure out how we got here from there, and what that may mean for the future. Thinking about the logistics of who is paired with whom; who has stayed out this year, and why… It’s this really complicated, dramatic scenario that actually is in there, yet just barely narrated.

All of it is told by your looking a character in the eyes and saying, “Whoa, what happened to you?” And then you look for the evidence, and you find it. And it’s this whole, intense thing that feeds back into how you read the game, and how you look at the next character, and the next. Which may in part why I find The King of Fighters ’99 — which clears the decks and introduces a new story, new hero, at the expense of the old, now-resolved plotline — so rewarding, and… why it may have irritated others. Because the answer to how we got here is so intense, takes so long to work through successfully.

This may also be part of why a game like its follow-up KoF 2000, though very well-made, fails to satisfy me as much. The answer to how we got here is… well, a few more (very cool) characters have joined, and things are moving along. Its intricate web of endings provides a deep well of speculation for the future. But the past? It’s basically, “Okay, you’ve played ’99? Well, good. You’re up-to-speed. Here’s another game.” Which may in turn partially explain why other people tend to like 2000 so much more than ’99 or 2001. It’s giving them what the average person who plays fighting games, even SNK games, is looking for: stability.

I am a weirdo in this regard, I guess. There are many things that I like about (the third and final game in that arc) KoF 2001 in particular. One of them is where it brings all of this. You read into (the old protagonist) Kyo’s psychological state in that game — what his moves are, how they parallel with (his rival) Iori. Knowing what he’s been put through the last few years, it’s kind of chilling to see. Nothing talks about it overtly, but you see him coming apart, turning into something dangerous. There is a sort of dramatic culmination in so many aspects of the game. It’s chilling in how logical, yet messy, it all is.

I just want to soak in the world of 2001, and what it means. Right off the bat, there’s so much coded meaning. One of the first things you see is (current hero) K’ putting his red glove on. This is really important. Later on, you see (new rival) K9999 coming out of his cloning chamber. His first action? Show us his glove. The game makes an immediate parallel and contrast here, showing their relationship; the glove is his identifier, whereas K’ has to make the conscious decision to put his back on in order to meet this new danger.

In 2000 it was a mark of victory for K’ that he ripped it off, no matter the pain he felt. What he’s faced with now is that important, that he’s choosing to wear it again on his own terms. Whereas before, he decided that he’d prefer to burn uncontrollably than to be defined by the thing and all it represented.

Granted, future games don’t really follow through on the stuff in 2001. But that’s nothing new. Likewise 2001 doesn’t follow up on all of the interesting implications of 2000‘s web of endings. But in it own right, taken as an independent thing, 2001 is just so heavy with significance.

Even the game system in 2001 follows this. It’s a brutal, simple logical conclusion to the disjointed scraps introduced in ’99 and refined without question in 2000. It’s not balanced well, but, what do I care? I’m not playing it competitively. I’m just appreciating it. The systems are violently elegant in their conception, which, considering, every other aspect of 2001, is so appropriate. The way it looks, the way it sounds, the way it plays — it’s all part of the narrative.

The crude, jagged-sounding, obsessively repetitious music — it’s overtly ugly, and that enhances the message. It sounds angry, dangerous, a bit deranged. It makes you uncomfortable to hear. Whereas ’99 is all chrome and gel lighting and blippy electronica, 2001 is corrosion and sparks. It’s like… we’ve come to this, now. Flesh is decaying. Metal is decaying. Minds are decaying.

And look at this; we now have a NESTS team, led by K9999. And Kyo and Iori are back for real now? And can you even tell the difference between them anymore? Everyone is falling. All is going wrong. With all of this happening, of course all of the character portraits are going to be grotesque. How could they not be?

But… I suppose most people don’t approach a versus fighting game the way that I approach Riven. If people who actually like Myst are so upset by Riven, I suppose I can see how SNK fans view 2001.

On Inference and Understanding

  • Reading time:8 mins read

(The following is based on my portion of a Twitter conversation with John Thyer, Amandeep Jutla, and Thom Moyles.)

Riven… doesn’t really have puzzles as such. It’s just stuff you notice and associate and slowly understand as you explore. Anything that may superficially read as a puzzle is usually a practical device that you just don’t understand yet. The reason you don’t understand is that it’s not for you. You have no part in this world. You’re an unaccounted-for interloper. It’s Anthropology: The Game. Who lives here? What are they like? What do they do? What do they believe?

Myst fans tend to loathe Riven because its puzzles are so impossibly obtuse and unfair. I suppose they should be, because… there aren’t any, really — and the players are approaching this beautiful, internally consistent world like, well, like Gamers.

There is irony here. The underlying story to Myst is about this violent family struggle, centering on Atrus and his dad, Gehn. Gehn is a hard-ass who loves the power of “creating” these worlds through writing, and acts like he’s their God. But he’s so bad at it. The worlds he writes are unstable, because he has no art. He approaches them like formulas to solve. He has to keep going in and writing more and more to try to stabilize things, but usually just makes things worse in the end.

The son, Atrus, sees the art in the writing, and approaches it as a creative work. Ironically he has doubts that he’s creating anything. He strongly suspects that these worlds always existed, and the writing just connects him to these places. (Atrus, unsurprisingly, fell in love with a lady from one of these “created” worlds, and married her. Name of Catherine.)

The games barely touch on most of this backstory, but it does help to inform what’s going on with them.

What I’m getting at is that Myst fans all seem to approach the series as if they were its villain, Gehn.

Riven is Cyan’s creative climax. It’s everything they built toward, and it was so monumental that it ended them. Myst is The Hobbit to its Lord of the Rings (never mind that The Hobbit is better). And people hated the hell out of it. Almost universally.

The game came out the same year as Half-Life; general PC gamers said, “More of this Myst shit? This is 2008, and the game is exactly the same as Myst! What they hell have they been doing all this time? Adventure games are dead!”

PC Gamer UK - Riven review

Myst fans were no better. Riven freaked them out because it looked like Myst and had the same interface, but they knew enough to know that it played very differently. It was like a Zelda II situation; what the hell is this? We want the same thing we liked before!

So, there was no audience for Riven. It got pilloried in the gaming press, such as it was. It sold okay, but nothing like what had been hoped. The pain of creation split up the brothers Miller, and so far as I know they never worked together again. Later games by lesser artists ignored Riven, each one promising to bring Myst back to its roots as a collection of self-contained puzzles, and nothing more confusing than that.

If people were just willing to listen, Riven could have changed everything about how games are made and read. If you approach the game as it was designed, it reads as a final creative statement about the evolution of the adventure genre into something greater, wiser. This is one of the keystones of videogames as serious works of literature unto themselves… which, of course, nobody ever plays. So, really, it’s the keystone of nothing. A cul-de-sac in the maturation of a medium.

Speaking from my own contemporary experience, Myst was interesting for its time, but had always felt not quite there to me. Riven was a revelation. I’ve rarely felt so transported by a game, into a real space that seems to exist for its own reasons apart from me. When I visit Jungle Island, I just stop at the staircase and sit. I want to feel the warmth of the sun, the cool of the shade.

More than that, though — the world of Riven is built on inference, and progress is earned through active speculation, based on an intuition and an empathy for the people and forces that shaped the world that you visit.

These are the traits lacking in Gehn. Gehn is not a mustache-twirling villain; he’s just wrong, and is angry. He’s an intelligent man, curious about the world before him — but he totally lacks intuition or empathy. He is, in our frame of reference, a Victorian empiricist. He doesn’t have the framework to understand what he’s working with, and it frustrates him.

In Riven the way that things are is the story. The game is about understanding the causality and the psychology that lead us to affect our worlds. It rarely if ever reaches out, makes an overt point about what we see. It leaves any conclusions to us.

For me, the game’s sense of narrative perfectly fits the way that I read media: looking between the lines for what brought us to this point. Why are things as they are? How did they get to be like this? What role do the pieces play?

Usually in videogames, the only useful answer is the functional one: either to reward, or to limit the player. Or, just, you know, because. If there is a rationale, it’s beside the point of the intended play; a triviality. Riven is interesting in that the inference is the play — and it just lets the player get on with it. One way or another, if you’re actively engaged with the world (instead of wasting your effort trying to solve it) you’ll start to notice how things reflect each other, how physically and conceptually distant things might be in some way related.

To make this feasible, it over-stacks the deck to ensure that the player will make some kind of connection. Every player will notice different things, and it’s pointless to force them to see what they don’t. Instead of going the Nintendo route and narrating the player to death — look at this thing; see, you need to do this, understand it — Riven accounts for different ways of thought by providing several routes toward understanding things. One player might make a visual analogy; another might pick up on an audio cue, or notice a thematic pattern.

The end effect of this effort is that every aspect of its world feels all the more layered and contextualized. The better you understand how it all fits together as a system, the better you understand how and why its pieces function — but what you do with that understanding is up to you.

Which may be why people hate the game, find it so difficult.

Something that has puzzled me since I began to write about games is that people genuinely seem not to be bothered by Nintendo’s “shut up while I explain at you” model. Though there may well be a counter-example, from Wind Waker to Wii Fit I’ve yet to see an EAD-produced game that allows you to skip or dismiss, or even speed up, a text box.

I’m talking about the text boxes that will pop up even the eighteenth or thirtieth time you do something, and talk to you as if it’s the first. The ones that stop your game to explain every key, every rupee; the ones that refuse to let you just boot up a minigame because an anthropomorphized balance board wants to spend several minutes talking to you about the weather.

Here I’m just talking about text, but it’s not just text. When Nintendo wants your attention, it won’t accept any response but obedience. Your role is to do what the game tells you.

And this — this seems to be what people want from a videogame. To hear it told, the EAD model is beyond reproach. This is, in fact, ideal game design. People want to follow a formula. They want to collect things, check them off a list. Ambiguity makes them angry.

Me… I would love to see, is there a list of other games that are about understanding why things are as they are? The first two Metroids (and Prime) do this, to an extent. The NES Zeldas. Phantasy Star. What I’ve heard of Gone Home sounds roughly aligned with Riven.

Why is this still, in 2016, so rare a perspective for a game to take? What, really, is wrong with videogames, that if any game should be heralded as the ideal, Riven is not that game?