We All Fall Down

Twelve Thoughts

  • Reading time:10 mins read

I’m staggering into well-trod ground here, I realize, but bear with me. I’m going to lay out a series of thoughts, and let’s see where they may lead.

Thought #1: Steven Moffat has been on a mission lately to wrap up dangling story threads, from River Song and her screwdriver to Simm’s regeneration into Gomez, to the “missing” regenerations between old series and new, to generally resetting the show to its factory settings (as well as that’s even a thing) for the next show-runner to make use of at will — putting Gallifrey back in the sky, putting the Doctor on the run, returning major foes to recurring status. Not all of these threads are his own; some, he inherited from Davies. Some predate Davies, to an extent. If there’s a loop to close, late-era Moffat has gone out of his way to close it.

Thought #2: Moffat also has gone out of his way to cater to Capaldi’s whims. Capaldi said over and over how much he’d like to face off against the Mondasian Cybermen; how if he was to go out, how great it would be to be done in by one of them. Moffat scoffed, and he scoffed. But, look what happened. He’s been sending the scripts (e.g., the upcoming special) past Capaldi for review, taking on board minor and major suggestions, and altering them accordingly. In turn, Capaldi, being a fan since the show’s beginning, has his share of suggestions — not all realistic, but many well-informed and well-intentioned.

Thought #3: In wrapping up his era — in fact, the whole “revival” era of Doctor Who — Moffat is not only returning the show to its factory settings. He’s bringing Capaldi back to his own first memories of the show. Capaldi gets his own Mondasian Cybermen, which is fine — and then as he denies his regeneration he’s transported back to the Doctor’s first encounter with those same Cybermen, which is in turn the Doctor’s first regeneration. Dramatically, this is some good stuff: some by-the-book thematic mirroring, to draw clear metaphors and enhance semiotic coherence amongst far-flung events, creating a sense of epiphany and oneness. It’s kind of like Chekhov’s Gun, or advanced intercutting (a technique with which Moffat overtly experimented throughout series 8, e.g. in “Listen” and “Into the Dalek”), in terms of James Burke-ing a sense of holistic significance on the chaotic and often desperate causality that tends to define the show’s narrative.

Thought #4: Moffat not only hews to Capaldi’s whims; he also seems to take an impish glee in running with off-handed remarks that tickle him enough for Moffat to make mental notes, e.g. the Doctor’s electric guitar. There were no plans to insert an electric guitar into the show, but after the first series Moffat asked Capaldi what changes he’d like to see; Capaldi had no clue, so, being an ex punk rocker, he joked about putting a guitar amp in the console room. Of course that would be silly; he just didn’t didn’t know how to respond to the question, in that moment. So, for no reason other than to rise to the ridiculousness of the suggestion, Moffat did as he wasn’t really told. Likewise at a convention panel, in response to Moffat’s canned joke about Hartnell not returning his calls for the 50th anniversary special Capaldi fleetingly suggested they could have got David Bradley in. And Moffat had a Larry David moment, staring off into space and thinking, “Oh.” So, lo, William Hartnell’s impostor is the Fender Stratocaster of series 10.

Thought #5: There is one glaring, famous unresolved thread of continuity to this series that presents itself in every clip show, at the show’s every anniversary, that people tend to collectively pull up their collars and avoid mentioning, lest they stray into “Paul McGann is the Rani” territory. You just don’t go there, for some reason, like it’s an unwritten law. For someone of Moffat’s impulses and humor, that challenge must seem awfully tempting.

Thought #6: Moffat is not exactly known for the expansiveness of his toolbox. In Capaldi’s era he’s become more adept at using his few tricks more constructively to tell meaningful stories, as opposed to flashing them around at the audience to show how shiny his tools all are (see: the Matt Smith era). Still, his scripts are typified by a few concepts that he uses over and over again. For instance, out-of-sync relationships with extreme time gaps. We first see this with Reinette, where we meet her as a girl, then a few minutes later as an adult, then eventually the Doctor pauses too long yammering about the plot only to find her dead — that he just missed her by moments. The same concept is remixed a bit for River Song, is worked into a monster-based story for “Blink” (e.g., when Sally turns her back only for Kathy to turn up dead, her note for Sally as delivered by a relative echoing Reinette’s for the Doctor), becomes basically the entire basis for Amy Pond, nearly becomes Clara’s exit in “Last Christmas”, and has some of its final echoes in the way Capaldi’s Doctor misses Bill by just a few hours, as a result of getting distracted by exposition back at the top of the ship. Moffat has a half-dozen patterns that he uses over and over, but this one seems to be his favorite.

Thought #7: Earlier, between the filming of series 8 and 9, a certain actor from the show’s past visited the current production and was shown by Capaldi around the TARDIS set. He said to that actor, oh, you need to come back, seriously. Then he went to Moffat, and said, oh, Steven, wouldn’t it be great to see them back? Moffat gave a non-committal response, as one does to that luvvie nonsense. Yeah, sure. Everyone should come back. Put them all in a boat with a single oar, and see what happens. We’ll broadcast it exclusively in IMAX at 2 a.m. Apply in the affirmative; nod and smile; yes, of course, let’s do it. Now let’s move on.

Thought #8: As further evidenced by the selling point of the forthcoming Christmas special, Moffat sort of a has a thing for screwing around with Hartnell’s continuity. He’s had Clara visit the Doctor as a young boy, then several hundred years later shown a splinter of her interfere with the Doctor’s choice of an escape capsule. Outside of the modern era, there’s no other part of the classic series that Moffat has shown such a significant and repeated interest in reinterpreting. This interest is starting to border on an obsession, and considering that Moffat is now brazenly dancing into the events surrounding Hartnell’s regeneration — something already fairly well-documented if one ignores that the episode in question is in fact missing — one wonders how deep this obsession will go.

Thought #9: Throughout series 10 — and here, if you’ve somehow been glazed over with my argument so far, you should be ready to groan — the Doctor has two photographs on his desk, representing the painful dangling threads of his family. One of those, Moffat took the care to resolve two Christmases ago, so for us her portrait is more of a recent, rather warm, reminder — though for the Doctor it’s a certain recent and raw trauma, as obliquely addressed in his Missy flashbacks. The other portrait is the one we’re not supposed to talk about, lest we look like total loons. And yet there it is, receiving regular camera focus — a recent continuity reminder, sitting with equal status beside what we must interpret as another deep-dive continuity reference, of the sort the show seems to do more and more under Moffat (e.g., Hartnell’s face turning up on that dingy machine in “Vincent and the Doctor”). Which is fine. Though, the camera really does like to focus there.

Thought #10: It has become something of a modern series cliche at this point that at the moment of regeneration the Doctor revisits the companions of his recent past. David Tennant’s narcissistic Doctor claimed his “reward” by visiting every major companion of his era, including threatening to bring on a paradox by visiting Rose several months before she ever met him — or, rather, met his previous incarnation. Smith’s Doctor had his weird “Head Amy” moment while Clara stared on. The recent trailer confirmed that Pearl Mackie is making one last round this Christmas, despite apparently having left in the previous episode, and well-informed whispers suggest that her predecessor has also put in at least a cameo.

Thought #11: At the start of the recent trailer, we were graced with a tampered Hartnell quote. It wasn’t the quote, the quote that you’ll always expect someone to use, for instance at the start of The Five Doctors (the previous time that Hartnell’s Doctor was recast with a not-quite lookalike); it was a moment from Hartnell’s final serial, into the final moments of which Moffat has chosen to insert his own final script for the show — in much the way that Hartnell’s visage weirdly morphs into David Bradley, to misdeliver his last few words. The quote used for the trailer was appropriate for its provenance, and yet because of its positioning and because of the expectations set about by prior art, it is conspicuously not the quote that we’re looking for. If anything, it seems to undermine that expectation. To read in some possibly unwarranted motivation, almost to misdirect from that expected quote — and by so doing, to create a dissonance that sets up a certain subconscious expectation.

Thought #12: In the recent past, Moffat has shown great willingness to bring back old characters when it suits the story, and to totally refuse to unless it does. In the forthcoming special alone, we’re already bringing back the (recast) first Doctor, and — to enormous surprise — a recast Polly Wright in some capacity. Clearly bringing back the two of them suits the story that he wants to tell about Capaldi’s Doctor. About facing the regrets and the pain and exhaustion that prevent him from feeling entitled to, or even to want, redemption. It seems to me there’s one deep regret that the Doctor has never addressed, that his fourth and twelfth incarnations may both share with a similar (if in one case more present) ache. If the Doctor is going to move on, and unreservedly accept a new, unburdened life, it may be some therapy to release that pain.

All of which is to say, the Doctor never did come back, did he. At least, not in dramatic terms, in the primary continuity of the television show. He made a bad call, and he knows it, and he’s been avoiding it ever since.

And, all things considered, it seems to me this may at last be his moment of catharsis.

What’s in a name (e.g., Sonic Mania)?

  • Reading time:10 mins read

So, on Twitter, John Thyer pointed out a tweet suggesting that the new 2D Sonic the Hedgehog game, over which the Internet has obsessed for the last 12 months, is meant to be of the scale of STI’s (that initialism grows all the more pertinent with time) split 1994-ish opus, Sonic the Hedgehog 3 & Knuckles. This was an ambitious game that, as with many Sonic Team affiliated projects, didn’t meet its deadline, so was hurriedly completed — only to be patched with a second cartridge several months later, containing what was left of the original game plus a surplus of new “content” to justify selling a whole second cartridge. Lock the two cartridges together, and they merge into a monster platforming epic that overstays its welcome by about two-thirds yet that a certain demographic will nonetheless cite as the epitome of its form. It certainly is the epitome of something. I’ll give ’em that.

Anyway. I groused a bit that this claim was not a promising sign, which led to the predictable Twitter push-back. Though, the format of that push-back was a little strange. The claim there was, hang on, Sonic 3&K is the perfect length! It had fourteen whole levels! What, did I want it to be 20 levels more more? Was I nuts?

Uh. Well, uh. Hm.

Let’s dial back a bit, and redefine what we’re talking about.

[The following, I shall repeat directly from Twitter. Consequently, there will be a certain degree of ramble.]

Fourteen “levels” [more properly, Zones — which matters; see below] is, like, three times too many. Especially since half of them are terrible. Sonic 2 was already too long by 1/3 or so. The original Sonic the Hedgehog is just about the ideal length. You get a nice variety. You can explore and master every level. It doesn’t overstay. You can replay. The one thing I’d say against Sonic 1 is, we don’t need to iterate a zone’s concept three times before moving on. Do act 2, boss, move on.

It’s like. Compare.

How many times have you played a game of Tetris, versus how many times have you completed Final Fantasy X for fun? Any time I want to spend half an hour, I can play straight through Sonic 1, have a slightly different and complete experience. Sonic 3 & Knuckles? No way.

You know the best 2D Mario game? Super Mario Land. Lots of reasons why, but a really big draw? You can beat it in 20 minutes. I have never beaten Super Mario World, and I can assure you that it will never, ever, ever happen. There’s too much “content” for the experience. Super Mario Bros. 3 is pushing it, but at least it’s made to be pushed through at a sitting. It’s dynamic, momentum based. Keep moving, changing.

Memory cards, and to a lesser extent their battery-based predecessors, are possibly the worst thing ever to happen to console games. If you want to trace the downward trajectory of design versus rote content addiction, it begins here. We lost all focus once we could save our progress.

I abhor the mentality that we’ve all silently grown into that games are meant to be “finished” then put on the shelf and never played again. No rule is absolute, but that’s basically the point. Expansiveness isn’t linear progress; it’s an accessory to design that has specific uses. Does the nuance of Metal Gear Solid 3‘s discussion justify its length and complexity? Almost certainly yes. Does Sonic 3&K‘s? Probably not. What’s the point of scale when the game never uses that space to say anything novel, and half of the “content” is trash?

The issue at hand is context. For a game based so intrinsically on forward momentum, does it suit that remit to so sprawl? I’m not going to pretend that the roller coaster streamlining of Sonic 2 is ideal, compared to the more measured study of the original Sonic, but it shows what I mean. Underneath whatever variation of (the side scrolling iteration of) Sonic is this set of physics that demands the player to Get It Done; Keep Moving.

When the game gets in the way of Getting It Done, this is a pronounced conflict, best used to draw intentional dissonance with the player. When that dissonance is unguided or misguided, it gets in the way of the game’s essential grammar and message in an infuriating capacity.

This dissonance is a reason that so many people dismiss Sonic 1. No spin-dash! [The slow-moving] Marble Zone! You don’t just keep holding right all the time! Blah! This reaction, though, I submit is a result of a retrospective misreading of the game’s grammar and message, based on a priori assumption. The portions of Sonic the Hedgehog where you aren’t just holding right aren’t examples of broken or misguided design; they serve a purpose. They serve both to establish a broader sense of grammar, causality, and purpose and to underline the moments of speed with significance.

Without a low (or at least a medium), any highs are rendered meaningless. Over years of Pavlovian garbage, Gamers now expect nothing but high. Not only that; thanks to memory cards and decades of rote remakes, they expect lots of it, and never to have to repeat it quite verbatim. We’ll never play this level again, so let’s have twenty more that repeat its basic ideas, so we can say we’ve had our full. Then sequels! And of course we have to save our place, lest we lose our progress and have to play those tedious levels all over again! Heavens! We can’t possibly lose anything, or we’re being treated unfairly. We need more, more more. But — nothing too different, or because we only want this one specific thing.

After 20 years, okay, another major 2D Sonic is probably warranted. Good-O. It’s not like we’re talking a yearly EA franchise update. But. To do this demands that one go back and deconstruct the grammar and messaging: how does how the game say things affect what the game says?

Pac-Man CE is a brilliant deconstruction/refinement of the basic concepts of Pac-Man, cutting out the parts that distract from its message. Sonic 2 is not quite as brilliant, as it just abjectly chops out or papers over the portions of its predecessor that don’t involve zoom-zoom — which makes burn-out a real thing, as the dialogue is nothing but one-dimensional peak messaging for way, way too long. Holding right on a D-pad isn’t interesting in and of itself.

Sonic 3&K gets around this slightly by introducing much bigger levels with different kinds of blockades — so you have to press other buttons besides just right — then mixes its messages, creating a new type of unpleasant dissonance, by timing the maze. (Granted, the levels in Sonic 3 are more considered than the garbage in its content patch (Mushroom Hill can go pleasure itself fungally).)

Point being, if you’re gonna revisit a 25-year-old legacy, there’s a certain remit to plumb deep and try to rediscover its essence. To wit: Gradius V, which, oh my God, finally nails what makes Gradius what it is, and builds a whole game around exploring the consequences of that notion.

This Sonic Mania thing is full of fan service, which is fine, if you’re really into Moia, as it were. The announced scale gives me pause, though. Bigger ain’t better. It can be a neutral quality that supports a justified discussion. But, if it’s huge just to be huge… then, oh dear. When you combine this intended scale with the admitted glory of fan service that seems to make up the game’s fabric, it sounds worrisome.

What is the justification for the scale? What is it doing that demands the player keep trudging forward, saving progress, continuing later? Does it just serve to eat up the player’s time, so that it can put a number on the back of the hypothetical box next to play value? Because, and this is key to the whole relationship between a game and its player, I have a life. Being is time, you know. If something is going to eat up what precious life I have to give it, it had better have a reason. It had better give me some kind of insight, or at least unburdened joy, that makes me measurably better off than I was before I played it.

Each time I play Tetris, or even a short epic like Metroid II, I gain something. I’ve been down this road, but it’s a rich and subtle journey. The journey doesn’t demand so much from me that the burden of embarking it outweighs what fresh nuances it has to impart on a review. I come out rewarded.

A game like Sonic 3 & Knuckles asks that I give it measurably more than it has to offer me. It does give a me negative inspiration — “Don’t Do This” — but it’s not thoughtful enough to use its time effectively. It doesn’t really question its premises and bring them to a logical set of conclusions. There’s not much questioning going on at all, which is, I think, most of my point. The design here is less art; more a matter of rote craft and capitulation.

If the game were to use that space to dwell on the sort of progress that defines a Sonic game and give time for thought, well, okay then! Sonic Adventure justifies its scope for reasons similar to this. It goes to such lengths to dwell on the elements that make up the series. When you’re looking at the motivation that drives the characters and the way all of their perspectives interlock, this is heavy stuff. If there were more meaningful interplay amongst the characters in Sonic 3, and that interplay were reflected in its design, then okay. Scale.

Mind you, I’m not saying that “story” in and of itself is a necessary prerequisite. That’s just one example of a possible justification. If a game is to go deep in exploring the expressive and logical consequences of Sonic the Hedgehog‘s underling assumptions, then take the space you need. I’m not working on a faith that this is why the new game is to sprawl, though, precisely because of how Sonic 3&K is used as a reference point.

If you’re just going to go through the motions of iteration, keep the length to what that iteration can support without overly burdening me.

(And, this is why I can’t ever play videogames anymore. I take them way more seriously than is warranted.)

Addendum:

Incidentally, Sonic 3&K actually has 26 levels, not including special stages or multi-player stage. Ergo it is, to use the original power’s words, “tiresome and boring.” The original Sonic? It has 18 main levels, plus Final Zone [the final showdown area] and all of six special zones. By the poster’s standard (an ideal of 16 levels), it’s much closer to an ideal length! If we were to chop out those unnecessary third acts (which Scrap Brain bulks out by repeating a Labyrinth level), it’d be twelve, plus the special zones. Even better!

Sonic 2 has 20 main levels (plus a few extra in the mobile remake) — with, importantly for this discussion, far less variety. This is the poster’s litmus for too many, and exhaustion.

Sonic CD? If we take into account the past, present, future, and bad future variations of each stage, that gives us SEVENTY barely-differentiated levels. (You may well guess how much I enjoy Sonic CD. The answer lies not in the number alone, but the “barely-differentiated” plus the number.)

Regeneration Nation

  • Reading time:5 mins read

So, a new regeneration. For those new to the process, this raises questions about the nature of the thing and whether the Doctor is in a privileged class among his people to be able to make use of this gift.

The spin-offs make a feast of Time Lord continuity. From the Master’s real name to that Loom business, ask any wilderness era fan about Gallifrey and instantly regret it as they regale you with the differences between a Gallifreyan and a Time Lord, the particulars of Time Lord biology and society, and the workings of their educational systems.

On TV, there’s nothing very conclusive — though there is a suggestion, which you can see in recent episodes such as “Listen” and “Hell Bent”, that there’s an extreme class system on Gallifrey, and that only the very privileged families are enrolled in the academies to become Time Lords proper.

That said, what is a Time Lord exactly? Nearly every on-screen reference suggests it’s the Doctor’s species (e.g., “The End of the World”), but that may just be shorthand for Gallifreyans in much the same way that, depending on who’s talking, “Yankee” can mean an American, a Northerner, a Northeasterner, a New Englander, someone from Vermont, or someone who eats pie with cheese on it.

The two episodes I reference above make for an interesting puzzle, as “Listen” suggests a difference between those who go into the military and those who go to school to become Time Lords — and yet as we see, Gallifreyan military figures also have regenerative capabilities.

Ignoring everything but what we actually see on the show, it may be as easy as projecting the class system to its logical conclusion. Everyone living on Gallifrey is a time lord, but only those enrolled in the Academy become Time Lords. Everyone is of the same species, and therefore has the same biology and theoretical potential, but those who go through the Academy learn some deep and fundamental lessons about themselves and their relationship with time (starting with the Untempered Schism) that give them more access to their inborn abilities — not altogether unlike attending a Tibetan monastery, as I’m sure Barry Letts would passionately have suggested. (See Planet of Spiders.)

The Doctor, being the Doctor, was not a good student. Ergo, his command over his higher biological and metaphysical functions is… lacking, compared to many of his peers. He attended Academy, yet shares more of a mind with the peasants left to scrape for subsistence in the wastes outside the Citadel.

There may be more of a reason to that than we know, as suggested in many places (e.g., “Listen”). There seems a strong suggestion that he came from a disadvantaged background, and only made it into the Academy and the associated high society through some kind of luck.

There’s no real reason to think this, aside from filling in the blanks the TV show provides, but it sounds to me like the Doctor and whatever family he might have had were somehow affiliated with the Master’s family. The Master speaks of his father’s estates, and how he and the Doctor used to run around them as children — but there’s no suggestion of wealth or privilege or family significance to the Doctor, aside from the fact of his having attended the Academy. It really gives a sense that the Master was a spoiled upper-class kid, the kind who would torture small animals, and the Doctor was the servant’s kid who, lacking any other friends, the Master took to as an assumed minion. It may well have been that association, possibly a good note from the Master’s family, that got the Doctor into the Academy to start with.

This may go some distance to explain the Doctor’s fondness for humans. He’s a time lord who may well be from an unprivileged background and, though he was “elevated” to the upper class, never fit in and still thinks of himself as one of the people.

Hartnell’s Doctor, being a recent emigrant (shall we say) when we meet him, may well still be wearing decades of this high-handed shell he was forced to adopt. It may only be after several beat-downs from Barbara that he starts to remember himself, and to allow those centuries of pretense to melt away.

For all we know from the TV show, it may be entirely possible for every person on Gallifrey to regenerate. They seem to all be time lords, with a small “t” and “l”, even if the peasants/Shabogans are barely considered people by the upper classes. They may not have the same command as the highly-trained gentry over things like regeneration and time sensitivity. It may be more hit-and-miss for them if it in fact happens at all. There may be urban — well, rural — legends of elders who regenerated hundreds of times, while others may only have one regeneration if any. Maybe the whole point of the Untempered Schism is to stabilize and regulate that business. Who knows.

But, there are lots of spaces in here to speculate. Which is, let’s be honest, a big part of the fun to a show like Doctor Who.

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?

From the North

  • Reading time:3 mins read

That first year of RTD’s Who is acidic about social justice. There are other things going on, but one major nerve is the contempt of the upper classes for the cannon fodder underclass. Whether we’re talking the Slitheen/politicians, the Daleks/mass media, the likes of Lady Cassandra — or even the aspirational Rose, talking to Gwyneth. Rose is working class and should know better; indeed she chided the Doctor one episode earlier. But she so wants to pass as middle-class. This aspiration, or vague sense of entitlement, is one of her major character flaws that gets her into trouble again and again.

“Why do you sound like you’re from the North?” she asks, unsure whether someone with an accent like that could genuinely have as much authority as the Doctor seems to. That he could really be someone. She doesn’t make a big deal of it, but it’s part of her preconceptions. One more beat among many.

Adam’s contempt comes back and bites him. Jack’s almost sets off an apocalypse — but he manages to ground himself, and find redemption. For Rose’s part, the first chance she gets she also turns her new status to her own advantage — or tries to — by changing her own past. That doesn’t go well either.

That whole run of episodes is threaded with this subtle point of distinction between putting on airs, acting better than others, and actual self-improvement. Which is to say, seeing beyond the lot you’ve been handed and working toward good, versus trying to climb the ladder by putting your boot in people’s faces, knowing that your new status will protect you from the consequences.

That ongoing discussion of our social roles and responsibilities to each other, mixed with flimsy satire about the structures that make us turn against our own self-interests and those of our neighbors, is just… important. Paper-thin jabs about massive weapons of destruction aside, the basic discussion at hand is wound so tightly into the stories and the characters and the way that they speak to each other that it doesn’t stand out as outright grandstanding — but rather a sort of furious lead by example.

Davies is an angry man, extremely cynical about the world that he lives in, and it comes through in his urgency for us to just treat each other as people and to be curious and interested in what’s happening around us, and why, and how.

The casting of Eccleston as the Doctor just anchors all of this discussion — as does Piper’s depiction of Rose. No other Doctor/companion combination would really lend itself to the discussion that goes on over these thirteen episodes.

The Death of Design

  • Reading time:2 mins read

Codification of a schema needs to be considered a regressive step, that limits future discussion by narrowing acceptable language. The moment you define what a thing is supposed to be, all meaningful inquiry will immediately shut down in deference to that definition.

Current charts of the growth and development of a form tend to be lists of landmark cases where frameworks were defined forevermore. For videogames, let’s say Super Metroid. Or A Link to the Past. Dracula’s Curse, Sonic the Hedgehog 2 — all of these idealized moments when something was crystalized as the template for all future discussion.

I am going to counter that these lists are in fact lists of the death of a form; of every turn where its potential was narrowed and stripped away. Any progressive chart of a form will list branching points where new and valuable concepts were introduced to the language. New potential. New nouns, new verbs, new adjectives. New examples of an expressive functional application of the form. Not definitions; propositions.

This is why, for me, game design began its slow death with Super Mario Bros. — not through any fault of the game itself, but rather through its canonization and codification. The SNES only cemented the rot, after which there has been no escape. I don’t know that we’ll ever escape it. This medium is rotten at its core.

A Deeper Pool

  • Reading time:7 mins read

The biggest problem with New Who lies in the writers pool. With the exception of the two showrunners, few unusually talented or original writers return after writing one or two scripts. With the exception of the two showrunners, every writer who has contributed more than two scripts has demonstrated a talent somewhere between mediocre and diabolical. Many of those have improved over the years; since 2010 Gareth Roberts has shown competence bordering on genuine artistic value. With each script, Mark Gatiss grows less disposable. Others, like Toby Whithouse, seem unable to think in terms outside of a writer’s course he took fifteen years ago. (Yes, lad. You would make Robert McKee proud. You nailed every item on that list, and failed to fall down the stairs along the way. Good job.) Yet every time there’s a fresh voice, offering a life perspective outside of the experience of a middle-aged white male middle class sci-fi fan with few other interests, he delivers one script, maybe two, then vanishes forever. (And yes, it has always been a he. The only female writer to date was on the diabolical end, edging toward mediocrity, and she was at the time the show’s primary script editor — so not exactly an outside perspective.)

What was rather distressing is that prior to 2014 the number of new writers seemed to diminish with each passing year. Over Moffat’s tenure the cast of characters became even more entrenched than in Davies’ era. Aside from a few glorious (often celebrity) one-shots like Simon Nye (Amy’s Choice) and Richard Curtis (Vincent & the Doctor), mostly we just see the same few uninspired names over and over — sometimes growing and improving their craft, sometimes not so much. Series 6, the year of Moffat’s horrifying sci-fi rape plot, was where the situation became really clear: this show is no longer about new or novel perspectives on life. It’s about dumb sci-fi nerds, and what they think is cool or surprising. At that point that status quo wasn’t much better than videogame or American comic book fandom.

The second half of series seven was a little better, thanks to the deeply ingrained efforts of Neil Cross — whose other show, Luther, has never quite clicked with me, but it’s a hell of a lot more literate than Life on Mars or Being Human — but the show was still treading water, relying too much on familiarity and gimmickry.

Then came 2014, and the show became something else. Moffat seemed to clue up to all of his own bad habits and tackle them head-on. In the first half of the series he took an active role in co-writing most of the old guard’s scripts, all of which manage a refreshing layer of character or thematic resonance despite the familiar nuts-and-bolts story material underneath. In the second half, it’s all new guys — plus Moffat’s ballsiest story ever. Most of the scripts are brilliant. The ones that don’t work are at least brave. They go for something bizarre, and if they don’t nail it — well, okay. At least they use their premises to ask interesting questions, make unusual observations. Kill the Moon has the worst understanding of grade school physics that I’ve ever seen, to the point that it makes me a little angry to think about — yet the basic idea is so bewilderingly strange that I applaud the effort, and it contains a couple of the best individual dramatic character moments that the show has ever presented. Peter Harness needed an editorial pass from a third-grader, but fuck if he didn’t bring something new and useful to the show. Jamie Mathieson came straight from screen-adapting Douglas Adams to write two of the best episodes of 21st-century Who — one on the basis of good ideas well explored; the other on exquisite control of his craft. Frank Contrell Boyce wrote some of the most observant, believable lines given to a child character in a TV show. If he also failed basic physics, he at least did it in the name of (seemingly sincere) poetry.

So, we now seem to know the script roster for 2015. It’s all two-parters this year, which means six stories of 90 minutes in length. The first and last are by Moffat, naturally enough. On recent form, I figure he’s got things under control. We’ve got a two-parter by Whithouse, which… I hope will be enough to convince anyone that his biggest successes have been flukes due to factors outside his actual authorial value. There’s an apparent two-parter by Gatiss, which I actually anticipate — maybe with that amount of space he will be able to explore the nuances of his perspective rather than just wallow in nostalgia and hit plot points.

That leaves two out of six stories, four out of twelve episodes to fill. Well, we know that one of them is split peculiarly between a Mathieson/Moffat team and Catherine Tregenna — Mathieson of the two series 8 stunners, and Tregenna of the absolute best Torchwood episodes to lie outside of Children of Earth. That may sound like faint praise, but Out of Time and Captain Jack Harkness are truly lovely, nuanced scripts and the only times that the show actually lived up to its ostensible premise. I always wondered why she never graduated to the main show — and now she has, granted in a peculiar script arrangement. So this should be interesting.

Now we know the final author — and it’s our Moon Dragon Man. Peter Harness is back to alternately infuriate and inspire. Given the scope of his last script (in which the Moon is revealed as an egg — and then when it hatches, threatening the entire planet, the Doctor deliberately runs off to force Clara into deciding for herself how to handle the situation), I am curious what he will do with 90 minutes. This seems like an experiment worth undertaking. How whacked-out is this going to be, and how will it use that to explore characters and consequences? And how simultaneously unsubtle and confusing will its metaphors be, this time around? I don’t really like his last script, but I respect his voice — and I want to see more of it. It’s so strange, and what it lacks in logistical rigor it more than makes up for with human insight. Which is what the show has substantially lacked under Moffat, and up until last year.

So, yes. This year looks like it will be interesting. An experimental structure, which simultaneously brings us back to 20th century Who and offers a chance for unusual breadth and consequence and exploration of topics promised in the previous series, with its long lingering scenes and extended conversations, that thanks to its development environment 20th century Who mostly only hinted toward. We’ve got fewer writers than most years, yet a good balance of dull and pointed and more space for each to make its case, use its voice to do something distinctive. I know to only expect four episodes of tedium, and even then with all of the pressure of filling 90 minutes of screentime they can’t possibly be throwaway stories. So even that will be curious to see.

I’m with it. I think this will turn out well.

Cappin’ All Dese

  • Reading time:2 mins read

Rewatched Death in Heaven on the way to work. Enjoyed it even more the second time — though those last 15 minutes are interminable. And if there is a logic behind the bracelet and Danny’s last wish, the script makes no effort to establish it. I could do without that whole beat. It’s bad enough to nearly undermine the previous two episodes’ worth of loveliness. Nearly a Doctor Dobby/clap if you believe in David Tennant moment. But it’s small enough to mentally blink while it passes. Whatever.

Otherwise, this is probably the strongest series finale yet — both unto itself and as a conclusion to the previous eleven episodes of character and thematic development. For all its missteps, the show is working on another level now. Rather than glib and facile, it feels brave and confident — ready to use its format to explore notions outside itself, instead of spiraling into a shrinking well of self-recursion. I’m excited to see where it goes next, now that the transition is done.

Lord, I don’t know what Moffat was doing the last four years, but it looks like we’re out of the tunnel now. I’m still astonished how fresh this all feels, considering how much is built with familiar pieces, by familiar hands.

Reference Boundaries

  • Reading time:2 mins read

A notion on which I’ve often dwelled of late (and may well have discussed here or on some social media outlet) is that when I was young I had no concept of a bad videogame. Games that today carry a reputation as horrible, poorly designed duds — Deadly Towers, 8 Eyes, Dr. Chaos, Hydlide — just seemed to me, at the time, as if they were above me somehow. I didn’t understand them, much as I was unprepared to understand much of the world. In that, they held a certain mystique.

I didn’t play them much, as I couldn’t get far and I got frustrated — but I never blamed that on the games. It never occurred to me to pass judgment. I just figured they were made for someone else, or for a time when I was older and prepared to understand them.

Even today when I look back on these games I get an intriguing sense of cognitive dissonance. I understand that they weren’t altogether successful creative efforts, for one reason or another — but they challenge me to look at things in ways that I otherwise wouldn’t, to try to understand how and why they are as they are.

In that, I find these games endlessly fascinating — whereas my fascination with more accessible, clearly well-designed games ended long ago, once I got everything that they had to say.

Fuzzy Horribleness: Pervasive, Worrisome

  • Reading time:10 mins read

These are the edited highlights of a three-way Twitter rant, simplified for flow and structure. Note that some of the features I lament here may well be present in the remake. I don’t really remember; it has been ages since I’ve played it, and I’m speaking to my vague, blurry memory of the game. If the remake retains the exploding eyeballs, which without checking it may well do, then… okay. Good job. How astute of you to notice. Here, bring this note to the old woman and she will give you a medal for your trouble.

Freezing Inferno: The Castlevania Adventure is not very good, but parts of it have a strange charm. When you play the patched version, I mean.

Me: I don’t know what the patched version is, but where the game falls down on mechanics it truly excels in atmosphere.

I’ll never argue that it’s a good game, exactly, but I love the feel of being in the game.

It has sort of a neat silent horror, crackly expressionist tone that feels just right. That’s sort of the tone I get from the best Game Boy games. Gargoyle’s Quest, Return of Samus. Silent horror.

It’s a curiously appropriate side-step, considering the Universal monster movie tone to Castlevania NES. Instead of Bela Lugosi’s Dracula, on the Game Boy we have Nosferatu. Sort of. Maybe a blurry print of Nosferatu, lacking a few intertitles and exposition scenes, played at the wrong speed.

It’s full of neat, weird ideas, some of which are creative workarounds to limitations; others… just odd. Had the game a billion times more checkpoints, I might call it playable. Still worth experiencing, though.

The Wii remake missed the boat by ignoring everything good and distinctive about the game along with the bad. The result is just about the most generic action-style Castlevania game ever, with the odd shout-out to TCA.

At least keep the game’s basic structure! Keep the ropes and the EXPLODING EYEBALLS and bounce-spit… things. Keep the weird upgrade path. Keep the most interesting setpieces. Keep the goddamned amazing soundtrack!

Why even call it a remake or reimaging if you’re going to throw away everything that defines the original?

ReBirth is like every shitty retroactive fan bullshit scenario of ignoring or “fixing” the oddball chapter to match. See the fan remakes of Metroid II, that try to make it more like Super Metroid. Or, well, Zero Mission. Except those had much more thought put into them, as misguided as the thought processes might have been.

In this case it’s more like some asshole looked at TCA and said, “That’s not a Castlevania game. But THIS is!” Then he ripped out random hunks of a half a dozen more-popular Castlevania games, and taped them together. I mean, of everything to replace, the music? Seriously? TCA has one of the best ever Castlevania soundtracks!

I mean. ReBirth is a polished videogame, if you’re looking for one of those. There are many out there. It just doesn’t have anything to say except, DUDE! THIS IS TOTALLY A CASTLEVANIA GAME! SEE! IT’S GOT ALL YOUR FAVORITE CASTLEVANIA MOVES AND MUSIC AND STUFF! IT’S ALL IN HERE! DUDE!

Fuckin’ gamer culture bullshit, that thing is. But it is a polished videogame, correctly made.

I mean, if you want to play that game, go play one of the games it’s tearing apart instead. Castlevania: Bloodlines is a good replacement. A near-era pastiche of the NES stuff, but weird. Or just play the NES games. Or Rondo of Blood.

Or… don’t. Go, feed the cynical meta-machine.

But… anyway. Yeah, I like The Castlevania Adventure.

Freezing Inferno: I remember being wowed by ReBirth, but I agree; there’s hardly a lick of any atmosphere.

Me: Or originality. Or purpose. Everything in there is just repurposed from an earlier, better game. And unlike, say, Gradius V it doesn’t have anything new to say about the elements. They’re there solely to say, LOOK! HERE THEY ARE AGAIN! SEE! IT’S TOTALLY A CASTLEVANIA GAME!

The remake falls into the trap of thinking a game is defined by its content rather than concept. Gradius V is a game built on concept. It strips away decades of cruft to dwell on one idea. I don’t think there are even any moai in the damned thing. Just setpieces built around Options. It spends a whole game trying to break down and define the series’ defining mechanic: Options.

That’s just about the best ever reason to revisit an old concept: to better explore its purpose. The worst reason is to dwell on and fetishize past notions for their own sake. HEY REMEMBER THIS?

That latter path is the one that has dragged game design down its own anus since 1985 or so.

Freezing Inferno: [So] Rebirth is basically a piece of dread NOSTALGIA in [your] eyes. It references things and incites memories of old Castlevania things in the name of lighting up those neurons that remember Castlevania… but it lacks the atmosphere.

Me: It’s not nostalgia per se that bothers me here, though I’m certainly no big fan of nostalgia in its own right. (Nostalgia is zombie thinking, out to devour the present and the future.) It’s more the regressive mindset of objective design — the idea that there’s some perfect game out there to be made; that design is all about doing things right, putting in all of the elements that people expect from a game. That’s as opposed to having a core idea, and then doing what is appropriate to conveying that idea to the player.

I’m being reductive. There was an idea to ReBirth: to “fix” Adventure and make it match all the other games. That, though, is the other thing that bothers me. It’s not much of an idea, but it’s troublesome in itself.

It’s one thing to look at the game and say, “Okay, what was it trying to do, and how did it fail in that?” and then to adapt all that, and try to accomplish those goals from a modern perspective. That’s cool and all.

It’s another thing to say, this sucks and it was wrong, because it didn’t match all of these other things. So let’s tear pieces off every surrounding game and fill the hole left by this unmentionable piece of shit.

That’s… I mean. It doesn’t affect me personally, but conceptually I find that kind of offensive. You know?

Freezing Inferno: Nostalgia in place of innovation. That’s the killer.

Me: I don’t even really know what innovation means. It’s nostalgia in place of a distinct idea or voice or theory. It’s like people who instead of thinking problems through rely on quoting famous, semi-respectable people. No, I don’t really care all that much what E.B. White said here, cool as he is. Think it through yourself.

By the same measure, all these quotes from other games — I’m sure they were great in their original context. How, though, do they apply to the present conversation (not our conversation here; you know, the design’s)?

In a good design, every decision, every game element comes from within the basic thesis of your design. It comes pragmatically out of what you’re trying to say with the game, and what that logistically may imply.

This stuff that ReBirth is grabbing from everywhere, by nature it’s not coming from within but from without. That right there is the crux of my irritation here. It’s a prime example of contemporary design vapidity.

ReBirth is a well-made game that has nothing to say, and borrows ideas to serve little but a priori expectations. In its own right I don’t mind it. If it didn’t claim to be a remade, improved version of another game, then… okay. Whatever. It would just be another generic, low-rent Castlevania game. With a series like this you’re going to repeat yourself and borrow from the past continually.

This, though, is more than a case of a series caught up in its own increasingly rigid myth. It’s an empty-headed piece of rote repetition that holds this formula as superior precisely because of its familiarity. In the process it discounts every idea that doesn’t fit the template, precisely because it doesn’t fit the template.

This is a shitty way to think about anything creative.

It’s an attempt to make an individual game fit the series, rather than to explore what the game has to say — which is both a pointless exercise and a tremendous missed opportunity to do something genuinely cool.

Deny the outliers. Sanitize the dissodants. As opposed to helping them better achieve their ambitions. It’s a kind of intellectual fascism.

There is a fine line between this mentality and all of the shit that women put up with from Gamers. There’s this enfranchisement of extremist reactionary entitlement bubbling below the surface of Gamer culture. It shows in subtle ways, and in totally disgusting ways, but it’s all the same process in the end.

This all is a big reason why I hate Gamer culture and why I’ve backed away from game writing as of late. I realize that it probably should be a reason to write even more, and even more infuriating pieces. But. Well. I just don’t feel the responsibility anymore.

John Thyer: Yeah, when you’re approaching every game as an imperfect permutation of some non-existent ideal, of course you’ll react with hostility to experiences outside the norm, often games by marginalize authors.

Like, Gone Home really isn’t that radical all things considered! But it still falls outside the closed mindset. And it’s ultimately what leads to the creator of Depression Quest being bombarded with rape and death threats.

Me: “Yeah, when you’re approaching every [woman/person] as an imperfect permutation of some non-existent ideal,”

It’s all the more raw and disturbing with games, compare to other media, as games are bottled perspectives. They’re not just a narrative that you follow. A game is a thesis about the way the world works. “If I do this,” you say, “then this happens.” Then you hand this to people, and let them see the world by your rules.

And in response, they get fucking furious and want to kill you.

Anyway, there’s something about mainstream game design that reinforces, rewards this way of thinking. It’s a small stimulus, but it feeds into this entitlement and pettiness, normalizing it as a thought process.

It’s not even the deeply ingrained violence that I’m talking about. It’s the Pavlov factor. Keep hitting your head on that button until you get the shiny reward. No means maybe, which means yes.

I’m being simplistic here regarding cause and effect, but there’s a fuzzy horribleness to game psychology — and that it is so pervasive is worrisome, especially when you consider the number of people who obsess over videogames, who make them their lives.

Because of the way that our brains work, everything that you do becomes a part of you, just a little bit. Learning is all about reinforcing those pathways between nodes. And the pathways that videogames reinforce… well. It’s not much of a mystery why gamer culture is host to such a population of irredeemable fucking monsters.

And that concludes my review of Castlevania: The Adventure ReBirth.