miyamoto

The Nintendo Syndrome

  • Reading time:12 mins read

by [name redacted]

Part two of my ongoing culture column; originally published by Next Generation.

So Nintendo’s at the top of its game again – or near enough to clap, anyway. The DS is one of the bigger success stories in recent hardware history. People are starting to buy into the Wii hype; even Sony and Microsoft’s chiefs have gone on record with how the system impresses them. Japan is mincing no words; 73% of Famitsu readers polled expect the Wii to “win” the next “console war”, whatever that means. And these people aren’t even Nintendo’s target audience.

Satoru Iwata has done a swell job, the last couple of years, taking a company that was coasting on past success, whose reputation had devolved to schoolyard snickers – that even posted a loss for the first time in its century-plus history – and making it both vital and trendy again.

So what happened to Nintendo, anyway? How is it that gaming’s superstar was such a dud, for so many years? What’s the white elephant in the room, that everyone has taken such pains to rationalize? It is, of course, the same man credited for most of Nintendo’s success: Shigeru Miyamoto.

NextGen’s Top Ten Years In Gaming History

  • Reading time:30 mins read

by [name redacted]

Originally published in some form by Next Generation. I was asked not to include 1999 or 2000, because the Dreamcast was perceived as a low mark in the industry rather than a high one. I was also asked to include the previous year, to suggest that we were in the middle of an upswing. So… that explains some of the selections.

In videogames, as in life, we tend to get things right about a third of the time. There’s one decent Sonic game for every two disasters; one out of every three consoles can be considered an unqualified success; the Game Boy remake of Mother 1 + 2 was released in one out of three major territories. With the same level of scientific accuracy, one can easily say that, out of the thirty years that videogames have acted as a consumer product, there are maybe ten really excellent milestones, spaced out by your 1984s and your 1994s – years maybe we were all better off doing something out-of-doors.

It kind of makes sense, intuitively: you’ve got the new-hardware years and the innovative-software years, spaced out by years of futzing around with the new hardware introduced a few months back, or copying that amazing new game that was released last summer. We grow enthusiastic, we get bored. Just as we’re about to write off videogames forever, we get slapped in the face with a Wii, or a Sega Genesis – and then the magic starts up all over again, allowing us to coast until the next checkpoint.

The Ends of the World

  • Reading time:27 mins read

by [name redacted]

Part one of my ongoing culture column; originally published by Next Generation, under the title “Culture: Games and Metaphor”.

For the last several months, this site and others have been nodding along to figures like Satoru Iwata explaining that everything you know is wrong; that everything you recognize as videogames is actually backward and childish, and making bold claims about what the future might hold for the medium. We’ve seen the “games as art” movement and “new games journalism”, and the backlash to both. It’s understandable enough; we’re human. We get attached to things; mere familiarity is enough to calm us down. Make the world a little less lonely.

Something I’ve not really seen addressed is, well, what’s wrong with videogames, anyway? The simple answer is that, in their current form, they’re pointless. Or, well. They’re not conducive to conveying a point, anyway.

It comes down to this…

  • Reading time:2 mins read

Here’s a theory: The worst thing a videogame can do is assume I have nothing better to do than to play videogames.

The problem here is that I still manage to play Nintendo’s recent games, sort of, begrudgingly — so either it’s not the worst thing or EAD hasn’t yet quite refined its process.

Here are some not-unrelated forum posts, which I provide without context:

  1. Super Mario World sets the stage for the star hunting bullshit to come along half a decade later and confuse game design for another half-decade after that.
  2. Oh hell. Yeah. The puzzle element of the level design. Which later turned into drek like the Metroid Fusion level design and… everything else Nintendo’s done lately. Making all of Nintendo’s games feel exactly the same, when they each originally had such different things to say.I don’t like that, either. It’s in SMB3 also — though the focus is different there. It’s incidental, and just meant to augment the experience. In World, it’s practically the whole point. Locks and keys. It’s all locks and keys now. Find the right block. Goddamn.
  3. That’s about it. World is about milking the game for all it’s worth. It sets up the whole modern design philosophy of “here’s a bunch of stuff to do — so get to it, because doing things is what the player is supposed to do!” without thinking too much about providing emotional motivation. You wind around and around until you’ve scraped everything out of the game — and not by choice. Not by whim. Not because you’re clever or lucky. This isn’t like the “secret worlds” in Metroid. It’s calculated. It’s what you’re supposed to do. What you’re expected to do, just because that’s what people like you do. It’s like Miyamoto has headed the player off and ruined all of the fun by setting up a theme park where there should have been something special and personal. I find it kind of patronizing. Note that, for its own sake, I don’t really mind Super Mario World. It’s not offensive yet. It’s just less interesting than what came before; given that what came before is perhaps one of the best games ever made, that probably doesn’t mean lots. It’s only in the broader Nintendo timeline that the game starts to irritate me. Cause and effect. Context and consequence. So on.

R&D1 does what Ninten… D’OH!!

  • Reading time:2 mins read

I think I figured it out.

I just read that Nintendo R&D#1 is no more. It’s been absorbed and folded into Miyamoto’s boring old EAD studios. This dismays me, as R&D#1 has always been the one Nintendo studio that actually interested me. (Well, I like R&D#3 also — I’ve no problem with Ice Hockey or Punch-Out.) This was Yokoi’s studio. It’s where Metroid and Kid Icarus came from. The Game Boy. The Wars series. Fire Emblem. Wario Ware, as flawed as it is (mostly for EAD-ish reasons), is one of Nintendo’s few breakthrough game concepts in years.

Now, though, it’s all EAD from here on out.

Shit.

Anyway. The SNES was where EAD, through force of sheer star power, first began to shove R&D#1 to the gutter. Mario and Zelda were Nintendo’s most popular series, so Miyamoto got priority. The SNES was his system. R&D#1 was reassigned to support the Gameboy. Note that the one real game the team made for the SNES, Super Metroid, is often cited as the one real reason to own it. Although I think it’s the most boring in the series, it’s sure head and heels above fucking Mario World or Starfox.

Again, the SNES was Miyamoto’s system. Suddenly there was no more competition. He just got his way. So this is where it all began to devolve. Nintendo just went with what was popular instead of challenging itself, internally (as had been the case previously). Refine what had been proven effective. And this philosophy bleeds out of every pore of the system. It’s like a whole system devoted to a more-competent Sonic Team.

In contrast, the Game Boy was Yokoi’s system. The DS is basically the successor to the Game Boy, and to the whole R&D#1 approach to design. This is the progressive direction, because it has to compete with the popularity of white bread.

And that’s just what the SNES is and always was: the Wonderbread console. The start of Nintendo’s entrenchment.

Texas Gunfire

  • Reading time:7 mins read

Doom is very different in philosophy and design from modern FP shooters.

Doom is built like a console game. Heck, Romero idolizes Miyamoto. Commander Keen came out of a demo that he and Carmack whipped up for Nintendo, showing how to implement the scrolling from Super Mario Bros. on a PC (which, I guess, was a feat at the time). Howard Lincoln yawned. The Texans made their own game.

Quake is, indeed, more the prototype for the modern shooter. It’s also kind of boring in comparison — at least, for me. Here they paid less attention to actual design; more to just getting a 3D engine up. That, and getting Trent Reznor involved. I mean, they already had a template with Wolf3D and Doom. Quake was just technology. They filled in the blanks with gray textures and asinine Lovecraft references. It feels like they were bored, doing it — as well they should have been, I guess, since that’s not what they cared about anymore. And this was about where Romero started to flake out, too. Whether the rise of Superprogrammer was the cause or result of this, I don’t know.

Doom isn’t concerned with being a first-person shooter as-such, since the genre didn’t exist at the time. Instead, it is an attempt to rework the rather barren Wolf3D into as vibrant a design as possible. To do something substantial with the concept, if you will. It’s kind of the same leap as from Quake to Half-Life, because it’s the same mentality at work.

Doom’s console sensibility extends from its controls (as with Wolf3D, it’s made to be played without a mouse; the mouse only really enters when you have a Z axis to worry about) to its level design and (as someone noted) pacing, to its monster designs, to its set pieces and its idea of secret areas and items.

For one, the game just drools charisma. We all can rattle off most of the monsters in Super Mario Bros. and Zelda. We know Brinstar like the backs of our hands. There is a certain iconography even to the level design: even if on a cursory glance it might not stand out as anything special, it bores into the consciousness just as well as a cheep-cheep or a zoomer. Everything is placed preciously, exactly because there is no template to fall back on.

And, as we know, there is a certain subconscious pacing built in, for how the game introduces concepts. You run to the right, jump up and hit the flashing object overhead. It makes a chime sound and a coin pops out. You’ve clearly done something well. You hit another block and a mushroom appears. It must not be harmful, unlike the enemy you either ran into, jumped on, or jumped over a moment before, as it comes out of a block like the one which rewarded you with a chime a moment before. When you touch it, you grow. Since you’re bigger, you can more easily reach the platforms above you. You try jumping and can break the bricks. Keep going right and you hit a pipe. Then two enemies. Eventually a pit. Then a fire flower. Then a koopa troopa.

And. So on. It all sounds simple, yet so few people get it right. And since it’s supposed to be invisible, so few people notice on a conscious level when it’s missing.

Doom does this, yes, on a mechanical level. Yet it does something else, too. It paces the atmosphere. I maintain that the best part of Doom is episode one (the Shareware episode) of Doom 1. After you leave the manmade environments, where something has gone really awfully wrong, and enter the abstract flesh-tents of Hell, the game has pretty much blown its wad (pun very much intended). Then the game just becomes about shooting, and I don’t much care for it. Episode one has a certain stress to it, however. You wander the station, looking for something to restore your ailing health. The lights go out. You hear snarls in the distance. You know something’s out there — but where?

And then there are just so many hidden passages. You never know what wall might open, and how. Or what you might find (like the Chainsaw). It’s kind of like Zelda, again. Often you can see things in the distance, or through windows, that you just plain can’t access through normal means. This gets you exploring.

The whole mindset that the game creates, with all of this — the mindset that it asks for — is different. It’s more introverted. More careful. The game is as much about exploration and generally owning the gameworld as it is about blowing shit up.

There’s a certain balance here, from level to level. Just study how things are laid out. It’s no mistake that the shareware episode is the best; after all, it’s the one that id needed to be good, if anyone was going to register.

>How would you say the modern FPS has deviated from this Doom mindset? And starting where, exactly? Doom II? Duke Nukem 3D? Quake?

I don’t know. I became disgusted with the whole degenre around the time of Q3 and UT. I like what I’ve seen about HL2, from this distance. It reminds me of, uh, Myst.

…

Quake’s probably a good place to start. Or maybe you could begin with all of the knockoffs of Wolf3D and Doom, which used the same engine yet didn’t do anything interesting with it. They helped to pollute the mindspace a bit, I bet, and distract from the reasons why Doom was as excellent as it was.

Quake’s the landmark, though, for all the obvious reasons. I mean, it led the way, from Quake to Quake II to Quake III, to a technology-oriented philosophy. It doesn’t matter what you do with the engine; it just matters what the engine does. Throw in a few rules and some network code, and you have a game.

I’m oversimplifying to an insulting degree, I realize. On the one hand, the whole multiplayer thing, although it appeals to me in NEGATIVE INCREMENTS, meaning a piece of me dies every time the subject comes up, has attained something of the same distinction that a versus fighter has in comparison to a sidescrolling brawler. It’s a place to show skill and piss on other people (even more so than with a fighter, for various reasons), and if that’s your kind of thing, there are a lot of excellent games to help you vent that testosterone.

On the other, you have the Half-Life-inspired movement toward using the form for a more holistic experience — expanding on exactly the part of Doom that the Quake thread gave up on. Halo sits on this end, mostly — though a little more to the right, toward Quake, than HL. If you were to count Metroid Prime as a FPS, it would be about as far to the left as possible.

>Masters of Doom says that Quake’s formative years were sort of the epitome of development hell. […] Carmack was going off into his abstract, workaholic computer world and Romero was becoming increasingly arrogant and was slacking off more than usual. The end result, then, was a Doom clone where the engine was designed independently of the levels, which were designed independently of each other, which is why they’re so goddamned bizzare and incongruous.

Yeah! I remember that, now. I guess that’s whence came Daikatana.

For my part, I did enjoy Quake at the time. It’s not half-bad. It’s just — it leaves me empty.

I can feel the walls closing in on me

  • Reading time:4 mins read

So everyone around me kept saying how great the new Zelda was

I don’t know. It struck me as another Zelda game, from what I saw of
it. And. I understand that some of Nintendo’s trends have been worsening. Even though Capcom’s making all of their games, these days.

Zelda used to be a thing of wonder. Now it is a template. Metroid is starting to go the same route, too. The series has been stagnating since the third game. Both series have been. It just gets more obvious, the more often it’s iterated. And the more out-of-touch and patronizing each iteration becomes.

Metroid Prime is a nice exception.

Wind Waker brings a lot of nice things to the series, just as Metroid Fusion does. The problems with them are the same, though. They don’t really succeed because in the end, the template rules. They have to answer to it, so they don’t get away with as much as they might. It’s mechanics, not experience, that Nintendo chooses to deliver these days.

I don’t give a damn about the rules. I want to feel something.

Here’s the part where I’m a wiseguy and ask which series has undergone more substantial changes over the years, Zelda or King of Fighters? I suspect most fans of either would pick the other, which is only natural. Fans of something pay attention to the small but sometimes crucial changes between iterations, while non-fans shrug their shoulders and say that they all sort of look the same.

I adore Zelda and Metroid — or at least, what they once stood for. The series have certainly changed; they’ve regressed. It’s pretty sad when the first two games are the most sophisticated, and everything else has just been about weeding away what made the games stand out from the crowd. A process of prolonged blanding. That’s what distresses me. I have come to be dismissive through one mediocre decision after another.

As far as fighting games go, KOF has evolved more in concept, and covered more ground, than any other series I can think of. If you can even compare it to other games; the series operates on its own terms. It’s more a serial novel than anything. Yet it’s a serial that only becomes richer and more rewarding as it unfurls.

Meanwhile, all of Nintendo’s series become more generalized and mathematical, drawing from the same proven design documents.

Metroid isn’t as far along the decay as Zelda, of course. Nintendo avoided the series for nearly a decade after Yokoi died. And Intelligent Systems isn’t EAD. Now Retro is doing some insightful stuff with the concept, fleshing it out in a way Nintendo never did. Zero Mission gets a lot right, especially where it borrows from Retro rather than from Miyamoto. I like the way it prepares the player for how to deal with Metroids, for instance. It is, however, still mired in the same hyper-safe, inbred theory that Nintendo’s been using since 1991. And with every generation, that theory generates more genetic defects…

If every chapter of KOF were 2002 or NeoWave, I would feel the same as
I do about Zelda. (Conversely, this would probably please a lot of people.) If a game like Wind Waker or Fusion were allowed to follow through on its own ideas, rather than bow to the Miyamoto machine, I would be inclined to care more.

I’ve not really played Majora’s Mask. It’s the only Zelda game aside from Wind Waker to look interesting to me since the NES. I played for about half an hour, and in that time noticed that all of the models were recycled from OoT. That wasn’t too encouraging, though I suppose it doesn’t mean anything on its own.

Again with the objectivity

  • Reading time:2 mins read

On a certain level, you could argue that Super Mario Bros. signalled one of the most drastic changes to the superficial in the history of videogames.

>That’s only true if you fully accept the maxim that All That Is Important Is Gameplay, defining all other aspects of presentation and style as “superficial”.

No, it isn’t.

Super Mario Bros. introduced a bevy of new(-ish), and useful, gameplay concepts. It introduced little new in terms of character or story, over games that had existed long before.

The most significant problem that the game fleshed-out into the form we see it now, is the one first popularized in Pac-Man: preference for a rigid pre-established world template, to explore and master, over a more complex series of dynamics, as in, say, many of the earlier works of Ed Logg, where the player’s actions determine the nature of the gameworld, and thereby the future of the game.

I’m being simplistic, sure. There are plenty of counter-examples you could find, were you so inclined, of previous games with this structure. There is plenty you could provide to argue that this concrete storybook objectivenesss was the direction that games were moving in anyway, or that this is where they always sat. And for that matter, Super Mario Bros. is not so much a culprit here as is the whole design culture that it insipired. But there you go. Super Mario Bros. more or less shaped the modern videogame. Most of what exists now does because of the concepts in that game.

Of course, this is how games became popular. First Pac-Man, then Super Mario Bros. You give something obvious to latch onto, emotionally. There’s nothing wrong with that in itself. It’s a natural creative impulse. I just kind of wish that games had gotten a little further before this objective quality took over, overriding so much potential for abstract potentiality.

…

This is also, to a certain extent, why I so dislike the Super NES, and why the Zelda series has been a bore to me after the second game. I just wish developers would quit giving me overt toys to play with, within a specific framework — action figures and playsets — rather than a framework where my presence actually makes a difference.

I would like to matter.

Frickin’ Fantasy XII

  • Reading time:7 mins read

It’s one of those laws. If you say anything negative about Final Fantasy, you’re just asking for trouble. To be fair, the complaints I have gotten have generally been civil. I just haven’t had much patience to reply in any helpful manner.

>I see gameplay in an RPG to be a bonus if it is really great gameplay.

If a game is designed well, it is designed well. This genre is developmentally stunted, as a whole. The reason you say this is that you have not seen what greater expressive potential would be possible, were the design philosophy intrinsic to this genre as mature in its development as it could be, at this point in the overall history of game design and in the evolution of game hardware. Pretty much anything is possible now — yet developers have not yet caught up with this potential; increased their ambitions to fit it, and find a new set of limits of expression within the medium; preferring to stay with the same limited design decisions that they have, more or less, been using since the 1980s — decisions which were instituted at the time merely because of the inherent limitations in technology and in design theory at the time.

This is a problem in all genres. It’s just that RPGs are the most prominent example. In a broad sense, they have not grown to fit their bigger shoes. Developers are more or less doing the same dumb things they always have, out of habit — or out of a lack of understanding for what these design concepts originally stood for, or why they were instituted. Or because the audience itself has not matured enough to ask for something more substantial.

You must understand that videogames are not what they could be, artistically. There are few developers at present who are actively trying to explore the expressive power of the medium; the rest are content with absentmindedly churning out reiterations of games which have already been made dozens of times in the past — games which worked, once, in a specific context. They might have even been clever for their time, for the solutions to contemporary hardware and design problems that they happened to find. What so many people fail to understand, however, is that those solutions are relevant within a specific context — timeframe, developer, hardware — alone.  The solutions that Shigeru Miyamoto found and applied within Super Mario Bros. were ingenious for that moment, for that game, for that history. They were an evolution of ideas that Miyamoto nurtured through several previous games: Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Junior, Mario Bros. Although some of the principles that he developed in that game — such as his general concept of level design, whereby the game implicitly teaches you how to play it without ever telling you what to do, as such — will probably always be applicable in one sense or another. Others are inherent to that game, to that one man. They are his ideas. Anyone else who uses them as-such — who just takes them and sticks them into his own project, without understanding why the ideas existed to begin with — is making a big mistake. Those parts of that project will be false, because they do not come from the subject at hand. They do not grow out of what this second person is attempting to accomplish. They are an easy and proven solution, yes — yet within their context. This new person, with this new project, has created a new context. And that new context, especially with knowledge of what has come before, demands a new series of questions and demands a new series of solutions which evolve from the demands at hand.

Here. Take a look at what Toru Iwatani has to say. It’s interesting.

http://www.insertcredit.com/features/gdc2004/iwatani.html

The techniques that Yuji Horii created for Dragon Quest are great for Horii and for Dragon Quest. They are his own ideas, which suit what he is personally trying to accomplish. The gameplay choices he makes are perfect for his games. Outside Horii, the situation is different. The question has to rise: what are we trying to accomplish here, and what is the best way to realize that, given current technology and what we understand so far about the potential of game design? If, in the case of, say, a Final Fantasy game, our goal is to tell a story, then how rich a story can we tell? What kind of a story? What manner of game design would lend itself most well to what we wish to accomplish within that story? Ideally, the game design would be invisible. You would not distinguish between it and the ultimate goal of the project — because the design itself would come from that goal. It would be designed in order to facilitate that goal. The game design itself, the game play itself, would be part of that story, and the story would come from the gameplay.

It’s not like this is hard, today. Take a game like, oh, Metroid Prime. The goal in that game, really, is exploration: communication with the environment. To facilitate this, the game is set in a first-person perspective. That way, you’re left looking at the game world rather than Samus’s ass. The game has a rather profound story to tell, yet to do this it draws from the main goal of the game, and from the established gameplay decisions. It is in the process of playing the game, and of inspecting the environment, learning about the game world, that the story unfolds.

Although story is secondary or tertiary in this particular framework, and it evolves organically out of the more primary elements of design, without interfering with them, you see the structure. There is no reason why it cannot be turned on its head, such that the gameplay, the overall design, evolves from the story. If that is the primary goal. Of course, that means that the game design would depend on just what the story is; what its own focus is; what the writers hope to get across.

If a gameplay decision does not lend itself to the ultimate goal of the project, directly or indirectly, then it probably doesn’t belong there. It’s the whole deal about too many strokes spoiling the painting. Even more so when the strokes are misjudged to begin with. Or when they are put in place just because that’s the way it’s always been done, or that’s what people expect, rather than because that’s what the painting calls for.

As long as developers continue to cram their ideas into existing, prefabricated molds — which describes most of the persistent mechanical facets that people have a tendency to associate with the RPG genre, in favor of the more integral goal of the genre (mainly, showing the personal growth of one or more people through a set of difficult trials, and what effect their actions along the way might or might not have on the world around them — thereby, with luck, expressing something meaningful about the nature of life) — they will be stuck in a creative rut. They will not grow as artists. The genre will not grow. The medium as a whole will fail to mature.

What I was trying to say, in that preview, is that Final Fantasy XII seems like it might be one big step toward pulling the genre as a whole out of its current rut. Toward making people /think/ about what constitutes an RPG — or just a videogame, in general — and what what they’re really trying to accomplish.

The rest was just a bit of passing commentary, to help explain why I said that.

Galaga, Fear, and the Power of Four

  • Reading time:6 mins read

Galaga is a refinement of a refinement of Space Invaders. It is entertaining and well-made, if a bit limited. Shots are slow.  The ship is slow.

The game does not really build; it progresses level-by-level, in a slight variation of the classic model: each level is a little harder. Galaga does throw in some variation, and the occasional bonus round. Nevertheless, the structure is the same as Pac-Man: you conduct the same task over and over. In this case, you clear the screen of enemies.

Tetris works on a different dynamic level, one more akin to the likes of Centipede. The world is constant and malleable. There is cause and effect. Just by virtue of playing the game, the game world itself is altered. Every choice you make will affect the future dynamics of that play session.

Unlike the overused shooting formula of Galaga and Centipede, however, Tetris puts the player in direct control over the environment: the playing pieces are the very objects which form the world. On top of this, Tetris randomizes the pieces that it allows the player, for his building. In this way, it forms something of a poignant model for life. We have liberty to build what we will with what we are given; depending on our skill and preference for risk, we can organize our world however we wish: build up pressure and risk of failure, or keep a steady release for lower rewards yet more assured success. Even the wisest and most expert of us, however, have only that liberty; we do not have full freedom, as there is only so much we can control in our lives. There is always an element of fate, or luck, thrown into our own structured determinism. We can usually see ahead a bit, to our next immediate task — yet beyond that, there is no telling what the world will throw at us, and ask us to deal with.

To play Tetris is to be in touch with one’s self. To play Galaga is to defensively distance one’s self from the world to the end of a barely-adequate gun barrel, and resign one’s self to the tireless, repetitious onslaught of a vindictive world in hope for the occasional small reward and a possible note in history, earned through one’s own sheer resiliance to harm.

Tetris, to me, seems a far more fundamental and organic parallel to the human experience, than any shooter is likely to be. Then, perhaps I am too optimistic.

An oppressive fear is the primary motivator in a game like Galaga. I am getting tired of fear. As I get older, I am less interested in hiding. I find it far more useful to deal with what the world gives me, as it comes, and in my own way.

The world truly is what you make of it.

Could this be said of all shooters, at their cores? And what does that say about shooter fans, in general? Are we all just afraid of some unnamed evil?

Perhaps. There is a sense of isolation and sadness that I feel in this kind of a stab at interaction. Almost a resignment to the overwhelming futility of life; there is no other way to deal with the world than to peck away at it as it flies at you, and try to come out unscathed — or even superficially on top, for a moment or two. Yet, that is generally only when you have killed everything else in the world — or, anyway, have cleared away more than anyone else.

Though it really depends on the game. As I mentioned, Centipede and Asteroids have an element of malleability in their game worlds. Although you still just peck away at the outside game world, your deeds do have an effect. You are clearly a part of your world. Your firing, in these cases, operates like a probe. There is, in a sense, a slight feeling of epiphany here in that the results of the player’s interaction is contrasted so clearly with the limited nature of those probes. Even the smallest action is relevant, in some way. Tetris is, in its way, the evolution of this thread.

Scrolling shooters add another element, that alters and enriches the dynamic somewhat (although this complicates the matter to make the message somewhat muddier to me, at the moment). The modern shooter — typified by Mars Matrix and Ikaruga — is so abstracted that it has come closer to the Tetris model of dealing with the world. It is, however, somehat more carefree.

I… there is noise here. Hard to think.

Oppressive fear could be said to be the primary motivator in everything in life. Even Tetris. But maybe I’m just being too pessimistic.

Yes. I suppose the point is, how do you react to that fear?

Are you saying that Tetris itself is an evolution of Galaga and Space Invaders, in that it gives players more freedom over their world? Or did you mean something else entirely?

Spacewar/Space Invaders -> Asteroids/Centipede -> [something] -> Tetris

It is not so much about what level of control the player has over the game world, as it is about the level of attachment or detachment that the game emphasizes. What control is offered, is reflective on the individual in accordance to the significance of the player’s actions, and indeed presence, within the world. It is an existential problem.

Pac-Man branches off in a different direction from the likes of Galaga, and pretty much founds the original principles behind the Japanese videogame aesthetic (later adopted and expanded by Miyamoto, Yuji Hori, and others). With Pac-Man, videogames went through an iconographic objectification process. On its own, that is not so bad. I am rather unfond, however, of the side effects it has had in the hands of those who do not quite understand the principles behind the change, and who tend to take that surface as-is, as the reality of the medium. That is… problematic.

On the other hand, I wonder how much further we can venture down the introspective route. I suppose the best way we can find out is by turning back and exploring what we have forgotten for the last two decades or so.

In a way, Rez is like a new abstraction of Centipede. I am curious where else this strain might go.

The Evolution of a Franchise: The Legend of Zelda

  • Reading time:2 mins read

by [name redacted]

We arrived late; the conference was already half-over, and the crowd had spilled to standing-room-in-the-hall-outside-the-conference-room-only. An Asian woman with a nervous smile asked us if we wanted headphones — sort of like what people wear during international debates. “Channel two is English” she said. I had no trouble setting my radio to channel two, or turning it on, or even adjusing the volume. Somehow, though, it still refused to work. Being the tall one, Brandon suggested I wedge myself just inside the door. I could see over everyone’s head. Eiji Aonuma stood on-stage, pontificating as if on a PBS special. To his left (and my right) was a large screen, showing a clip of Link, from The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker, running through the first few scenes of that game.

I turned to Brandon. I pointed toward my radio. Brandon pressed the power button. He adjusted the volume. He fiddled with the antenna. Then he shrugged and began to turn away. A moment later, he grabbed the end of my headphones and plugged them into the radio. My ears began to melt with Hell’s very own translation. I seized the radio and spun the volume dial to half of what it was.

When my senses recovered, Aonuma was talking about all of the little, insignificant details in the Zelda series, and how they bring reality to the game. He spoke of the difference between reality and realism. “To Miyamoto, reality is far more important,” Aonuma explained. This seemed fair enough, if a bit obvious. He then took the time to give several examples of just what reality means in the context of a game like Wind Waker.

( Continue reading at Insert Credit )

Askew

  • Reading time:2 mins read

I just realized that most artists only really have one thing to say. If that. Everything they do is just a refinement of, or another aspect of, that single contribution that they have (that being their own selves).

I suppose this should be obvious. We’re all individuals. The more rounded individuals, perhaps, have more corners of their minds to lay bare.

All the same: Miyamoto has never really varied since his original ideas for Donkey Kong and Mario Bros. Those added up into Super Mario Bros., and then Miyamoto took things a step further to hit upon The Legend of Zelda. Since 1987, it’s all just been refinement. He doesn’t have much to say that we haven’t already heard.

Same goes for Rieko Kodama, really (as much as I enjoy her work). She’s still kind of working with the tools she devised a decade and a half ago. BioWare did a lot with their first RPG, but they haven’t done a lot since then.

Hitchcock kept whacking out variations on the same two or three themes. Most of his work involved finding people he enjoyed and allowing them to do whatever they wanted within his vague descriptions. The Beatles had a lot to say by the end, but that comes from the chemistry of five key voices (including George Martin) and all of their experiences.

Miyamoto did his part. He’s done now. Hitchcock did his part. So is he. So are the Beatles. (Really, what of great merit have any of them done since the early ’70s?) They’ve each come out of nowhere with a new perspective and pointed out untapped possibilities within their own respective contexts. And in so doing, they’ve helped the context change.

And the world keeps moving. If they don’t, they’re left as a noble milestone; as a reminder of the need for perspective. Not as a template, however. Anything else is idolatry.

And that’s where all of the problems lie.

I’ve got a headache.

Game Artists’ Manifesto

  • Reading time:10 mins read

Skies of Arcadia — there’s little I did in that game that didn’t result in something rather wondrous. And little that didn’t feel important in some way. Everything about Arcadia, it’s set up to build anticipation and wonder. Even just the dungeon and town design.

Take that ruin near the beginning; the tower where the moonstone lands, just after the intro events. There’s this long walkway, above water. The camera follows behind Vyse’s shoulders. There’s a fish-eye effect, which seems to make the path stretch on forever. And way on the other end is the dungeon. As Vyse runs toward it, his feet and elbows flail back toward the camera. He seems eager to get where he’s going. And we’re following him, seeing what he sees. It’s not really that far, but there’s this buildup of tension as you approach. And — inside, it’s one of the first real 3D dungeon environments I’d encountered in a console RPG.

That is to say: it takes its third dimension into account. As it it’s a real space, with is own logic. As you progress, you begin to understand the importance of features that you didn’t more than notice before; elements of the dungeon’s structure. And eventually, you solve it like a Rubick’s cube of sorts. You’ve unlocked its secrets, and mastered some skills, and begun to own some space.

It leads you on, but it does so by trusting you to follow your intuition. And when you do that, you’re rewarded. That is what is glorious about the game. It is built to reward curiosity, and gut instinct. And it does a great job at creating that curiosity to begin with. That is its genius. Then there’s the fact that most of the elements that are required to understand are in plain view through most of the game — it’s just that you need to play the game, to understand the significance of everything in the world well enough to put it all together. It’s a real place, and you get to know it by living there.

By the end of the game, there’s this sense of great enlightenment. So that’s why the world is the way it is. And — there’s still more left to discover. It leaves one with the feeling of possibility. Like anything could be out there, if one just were to work hard enough to find it. It’s incredibly inspirational. And this is all… intentional. Maybe not fully conscious, but it’s part of the game’s design.

Part of this comes from the protagonist, Vyse. There aren’t a lot of positive models in modern videogames. Not a lot of hope. After all of this cynical angsty Squareish teenage punk nonsense, it’s refreshing to see a lead who is actually a hero. Who has some spirit. It makes me feel like… I can do things. It’s all about attitude. That is to say, what you make of your situation. I feel that he’s the condensed center of Kodama’s message to her audience: Never give up. Never look down. Be proud. There’s always a way.

It’s not just the actual events within the game — it’s the strength of the conceptual significance behind them. I mean. It’s fiction. But fiction illustrates a lot about normal life. One of the best traits of fiction is the capacity to illustrate possibiliy. Whether this is tangible possibility, or just the emotional sense for where it comes from and what it means.

This isn’t something that you honestly get from most videogames. I’ve only gotten it from a handful. The original Zelda. Phantasy Star II. Riven. Skies of Arcadia. They all have made me look at the world differently. They’ve strengthened me, personally, in one way or another. That’s a sign of pretty good literature, I’d say.

I find it really interesting that Kodama is responsible for two of the games on that list. She… well. There’s a reason why I cite her as my favourite game creator. Shenmue has a bit of that, although its clunky (if endearing) AM2-ish edges keep it at a bit of an emotional distance.

The reason why I cite these games as amongst the best I’ve played is because they aren’t content with just being videogames, as such. They carry a deeper meaning. And not a contrived one, just for the purpose of being “deep”. They… stretch outside the boundaries of their medium and do something, emotionally. They actually speak some pretty inspiring messages to their audience, if the audience is willing to listen.

Most games are too calculated. Most games are designed by programmers. Or worse, by people who want to make videogames. Kodama and Miyamoto are both artists, foremost. Miyamoto has become… entrenched in Miyamoto in recent years, unfortunately. Still, he started as a slacker art school kid who didn’t even know that the company he was joining made videogames. Kodama didn’t exactly know what Sega did either, from what she says.

Rand and Robyn Miller, behind Myst — well. They certainly didn’t set out to be game designers. And by the time they’d gone through their first rough draft (that being Myst itself), they had amassed a pretty huge trove of mythology. They just… wanted to make their own world, with its own history and logic. And all of that work came to fruition in their second game.

This stuff, you can’t teach it. Being taught means being told “this is how to do things”. Generally speaking. Learning, on the other hand, means coming to recognize the organic patterns behind things and how to relate with them. It’s about communication. This isn’t something that can ever be pressed into you. It’s something you have to have the will to seek out on your own. The most someone can do is to set all of the right pieces before you, and to illustrate what they might mean. But it’s up to you to approach, and to add those pieces to what you’ve already collected. And to pick up the hints as to what else they might imply about you and your world.

It’s just like how you can’t tell a person how to write a novel. Or else you’ll get… a bunch of form-feed novels. The best way to learn is to simply have the right environment. To have the right materials around. To be given enough context and enough carrots to inspire you to look for meaning on your own — to care about the world, and about life. And to have someone or something you can use to reorient you, whenever you’re lost. And this is why art is so very important. That’s part of what it does — it provides some of that context. It helps to hint you in the right direction to finding your own meaning in life.

Art is actually a strange term. It’s rarely used correctly. Even I misuse it. Art is a process, more than a thing. A thing cannot Be art, in and of itself. Art comes in the process of interpretation of that thing, by the individual. It’s a way of looking at the world, really. As is science. Hamlet is not art, unto itself. It is art To Me, because I appreciate it as such. Because its meanings are strong enough, and I’m able to find something within them that has relevancy to my life. There is no objective Art. By its very nature, art is subjective. It’s when people try to put art on a pedestal that it gets… well, pretentious.

Something to think about: the only way you know the world is through your own senses, and your own understanding of the world. Whether the world really exists, you can’t know. The only basis for verification that you have is your own self. Objectivity — removal of one’s self from the picture at hand — is useful for understanding the inner workings of a system within the world that you perceive. However — whether or not thost things really exist, that you choose to be objective about, really comes down to a subjective decision. Therefore: in order to gain understanding of the world, the first step should be to search for what the world means to you. Through that, you can do anything else. You can play with your subsets of objectivity all you like. Of course — once objective understanding is established, that automatically gets kneaded back into your overall subjective understanding of life, your world, and what sense it all makes.

Science can, in a very real sense, be considered an art — inasmuch as it is a subset of the same methodology of understanding, with its own unique behaviors — just as philosophy differs from painting, differs from film direction, yet all are the same thing in the end. It’s all life, really. It’s all about understanding, and communication.

Videogames, too often, are held as objects; as important for their own sake. It’s easy to be fetishistic about them. I certainly am, at times. This is a problem of interpretation, all across the board — on the part of the “consumer” (read: the audience), as well as the critics as well as those who actually produce the games. The average videogame is no more important, artistically, than the average Hollywood explode-a-thon. Or romantic comedy, or whatever other tired formula you like. All the same.

Now. There’s something to learn from that as it is! You know what they say: there’s more to learn from bad art, than from good; from carelessness, compared to compassion. Provided that you’re willing to put in the effort to find it. However: something needs to change.

If this medium is ever going to become respectable, and to come unto its own as a form of expression — we need more people communicating through it. And using it as a medium to inspire understaning. We need to change our expectations, and stop considering videogames as important for their own sake, rather than for the the sake of the meaning they contain for us personally. And for the sake of the life which goes into them as an outlet for their creators.

Comfort is a dead end. Life is change. The moment you stop, you die. Either inside or outside. The body itself is ever changing; it’s different from one day to the next. All of the matter in your body now will be gone in seven years. You’ll technically be a completely different person. The moment that’s no longer true – it’s the same thing. It’s just the nature of life. Stasis doesn’t fit into that.

Gradually, I’m allowing more and more change into my life. And the more I let in (within my tolerance levels), the more I indeed feel that life. The more I learn to appreciate it, simply for what it is.

Videogames have the potential to convey so much meaning. And it’s not really a medium that’s been tapped well, on either end of the divide. Maybe I can help bridge the gap a bit. I don’t know. Help to give people one more outlet, to gain and express meaning for their lives. I guess… I’m pretty much doing the same thing.

PAC NEEDS FOOD BADLY!

  • Reading time:1 mins read

There is an intrinsic difference between the Asteroids/Centipede model of game design, and the Space Invaders/Pac-Man one. It’s the latter, somewhat less flexible, design sensibility (through a Miyamoto filter) which has most directly evolved into our current ideas about console and arcade games. I’m not entirely sure if this is ideal, although it’s lent some mass appeal to the medium.

I wonder how things might’ve been different if the American model had continued to evolve into the modern era. If we’d gotten a chance to hone it as well as the Japanese model has been (up to the painfully entrenched form that it’s in now).

I’m too tired to illustrate. I might, later.

I’m sure some of you out there already are tracing my thought patterns, however.

I think it’s kind of interesting.

Again. Probably the solution is to combine the two sensibilities. Retro and Silicon Knights remain the test cases for a rather different kind of a merger (that being the quickly-tiring Miyamoto school and the modern Western PC-oriented mindset). I wonder what’d happen if we were to work back in some of the Ed Logg mentality.

MIYOMIYOMASU!

  • Reading time:1 mins read

From here:

SM: I just want to make games that make high-school girls happy. And high-school boys, too.

Oh yeah. Miyamoto is letting his mission slip.

He’s just in it for the chicks.

Also!

Student: Ah, um, um… What do you think of girl games?
SM: Sorry, what?
I: Umm… What do you think of “bishoujo” games.
SM: Oh.

He seems… caught rather off-guard.

“What… kind of girl games do you mean? … Oh, I see. Ahem!”