myst

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?

The Playlist / Those Tenuous Twos

  • Reading time:23 mins read

by [name redacted]

You may have read the first part of this column in the December 2009 Play Magazine. It was intended as a single article, and the start of a whole series of such lists. In the event, I was asked (due to my incorrigible verbosity) to break the article into three pieces; only the first found its way to print. Here is the column in full.

Used to be, when a game was successful enough to demand a sequel, the design team would do its best to avoid repeating itself. Though I’m sure they mostly wanted to keep their job interesting, the practical effect was that if the games were different, they would both remain relevant. In an arcade, Donkey Kong Jr. could stand handsomely by its father, each shilling for its own share of the coin. You might call them companion pieces, rather than updates or replacements.

When home consoles hit, design teams were even more modest, and were generally left to do their own thing. So starting on the NES, you will see a certain trend: successful game spawns weird, only tenuously related sequel; fans of the original scratch their heads; a greatly expanded dev team releases a third game, which is basically just the first again, on steroids; fans think it’s the best thing ever, because it’s exactly the same, except better! And to hell with that weird second chapter.

Thing is… usually the second game is the most interesting you’ll ever see.

Cybermen

  • Reading time:1 mins read

Mm. Tomb is really the only time I think they’ve been used well — as objects of creeping fear and mystery. There’s a sense they’re this contained force; they’re the snakes in this box that you absolutely must keep closed. And they just keep charging forward, blank, expressionless, incomprehensible. They’ll charm you, try the back door, use every crack to their advantage. (Much like Captain Jack?)

Mostly they’re just used as generic shuffle-monsters. Or, in the ’80s, alien race. Or as a droll bit of wank, as above.

Actually, I thought that Cyberwoman did a good job at capturing their threat. They’re like a plague, is what they are. A schlocky B-movie plague. The kind of thing you should be making up arbitrary rules to protect yourself from. Don’t dangle your feet over the bed. Don’t step on the red squares.

I’d like to see Moffat write for them.

The Soul Patch of Ire

  • Reading time:3 mins read

So I’ve rambled about the Sontarans, and how essentially uninteresting they are as they have been portrayed and used: yet another proud warrior race, which, aside from being familiar and trite, means they’re rational and focused and therefore no particular threat unless you’re distinctly in their way — and even if you are, you just may be able to talk your way out of harm. Furthermore, they have usually only appeared one or two at a time, leaving them to waddle around in the place of any other generic monster. Not too effective!

Leaving aside the cosmetic update, which is half brilliant (the prosthetics) and half ridiculous (the suit), the new series team has done two things with the Sontarans, at least one of which should have happened thirty-some years ago. First, they’ve finally taken narrative and thematic advantage of the Sontarans’ nature as clones — which has, to date, mostly been background detail. This is a wealthy area to explore, and I’m really curious where they’ll go with it next week, up through episode thirteen. Second, and more immediately significant, is the adaptation of their “proud warrior code” into a relatable emotional threat.

It’s subtle; they’re not playing it up too much. Yet the Sontarans have been rejigged from their status as basically ineffectual boogiemen to fit alongside the Slitheen and the Daleks as somewhat ridiculous, somewhat imposing, altogether unreasonable adult figures. Where the Daleks represent wrath and the Slitheen, hypocrisy, the Sontarans are now spun as manipulative “tough love” paternal figures, full of their own unpleasant martial codes through which they measure everything and everyone. If you can adapt and get into their graces, which generally involves behaving in ways that don’t feel very comfortable, you’re all right. You get a certain amount of praise and appreciation. If you can’t do that or you can’t maintain it, though, you get stomped all over — and they try to tell you that it’s your own fault, for having failed them. For being weak. For somehow just not being good enough.

The point is driven home by the irritating “teen genius” in this week’s episode, who serves basically as the smug over-achieving suck-up that everyone hates, and everyone is measured against. “Why can’t you be more like Luke? Luke never fails me.” What Luke doesn’t realize in his smugness, of course, is that he’s just a tool for someone else’s ego and sense of righteousness. And the moment he stops serving his purpose, whether through his own doing or otherwise, he’s in for a huge fall.

It’s not as visceral a threat as some of the other adversaries, yet it is poignant. Combine it with the clone theme, and the Sontarans are suddenly a rather complex and nuanced device.

The Remake of Samus

  • Reading time:4 mins read

Someone put a lot of effort into addressing the common complaint that the entire Metroid series isn’t exactly like Super Metroid, with different maps.

You know what a Metroid II remake would really need? Complex lighting. And lack thereof.

Lack of ambient lighting, a lot of the time. You’d get some from lava, from certain bioluminescent materials, and whatnot. Maybe some areas would be brightly lit. Mostly, though, and at times exclusively, you’d be relying on a certain tapering bubble of light around Samus. Outside of that you’d get a vague hint of shapes and motion. This would also give the game a somewhat monochrome appearance.

Maybe the more injured Samus is, the smaller the window or the dimmer the light, or the more flickery.

Heck, maybe phaser shots would set things on fire, creating light and attracting/distracting certain monsters.

Maybe, instead of a map, a way of marking the terrain. So you’d know if you’d been somewhere. Like, if the spider ball were to leave a faint residue behind…

Shepard: You could even have upgrades that enhance how much light Samus gives off, as an extra bonus.
Like maybe your gun shots are a little more sparkly now.

Me: I can see an argument for adding the charge shot.
Just hold the charge to light the room, pretty much.

Shepard: Try to tune it so that Samus’s ambient light increases as the environmental light decreases.
So at the beginning you’ve got all these fungi and lava pits and glowbugs.
And by the end it’s just… a dead pit.
Maybe the occasional nigh-dead Chozo lamp.

Me: I like how a lot of the natural lighting will be a deep, threatening red.
From all the lava.

Shepard: Mmm.

Me: A lot of the game, where there’s color, it will seem tinted.
Oh heck. And light would generally just show the surface of things. So outside a certain number of pixels (one “block” or so), walls would be flat black.

Shepard: Yeah.

Me: A narrow, well-lit corridor would still leave half the screen dark.
Creating a sort of letterboxed, managed feeling to the space.

Shepard: I wonder how that would look if you had the rare, fully-lit-even-penetrating-the-tiles room, for Chozo Artifact rooms.
I get the feeling players would want to just chill out in those rooms.

Me: That would seem comparably tranquil, wouldn’t it. especially if the light were to have a sort of ethereal, light blue cast to it.

Me: I want to play this now.
Heck, this sounds closer to what Metroid should be doing in general.

Shepard: It is warm inside the power suit.
Everywhere else is cold.

Me: The third game set too much of a template for laying everything out in front of you like a videogame. Here’s this kind of tile, which needs this kind of key to break. You need this to get through here. Everything laid out clearly; you just have to go through the motions. All very rational. Of course, it’s a lot less obnoxious about this than other games that followed (and preceded it). Still, Metroid shouldn’t be an action puzzle game. It’s supposed to be mysterious, oppressive, anxious, and a little wonderful.
The first two games have this.
Fusion does, a little, in its completely different way.
Prime does, pretty much. The first one.

Shepard: It turned “do it because I said so” into the actual story.

To add to earlier ideas: surfaces glisten. So (depending on the potency of a light source and the reflectivity of a material) to things just outside the range of full lighting, you’d still get some faint one-pixel-wide reflection off any surface parallel to the light source, partially outlining an otherwise black mass. Which would be incredible if there were several living things around the edges of the screen.

Combine this with the business about spider balls leaving residue, and there’s a lot of complex stuff going on with edges.

Maybe an infrared visor upgrade, that you can toggle. Danger of flaring sometimes, especially when you’re shooting. When exploring and travelling, generally speeds things up.

The Purple Rose of Cardiff

  • Reading time:4 mins read

This year, Torchwood has become a very entertaining way to make fifty minutes disappear. It has pretty much worked out what it’s doing, even if it has yet to figure out why.

Today’s episode, though (which deals in nasty people materializing out of old films), resembles a lot of series one episodes, or “42” from series three of Who, in that it feels like it could be an episode of nearly any TV show with a vague sci-fantasy bent to it. Although the hero roles are roughly adapted to the main cast and all their quirks (despite continued confusion about Owen’s current status; can he feel anything or not? Can he breathe or not?), the same script could have been tweaked for The X-Files or Supernatural or (yes) Hammond’s own Sapphire & Steel, or any number of other shows in this vein. And it might fit in any of those somewhat more mystical shows better than in Torchwood.

(Man, I wonder if Mark Gatiss is going to write for this show. That would have been so appropriate for series one.)

It’s just this narrative island, that sticks out from the relatively tight narrative this year. And it’s clumsily written in places. The ending, in particular, which pulls out that “The story isn’t over! Be afraid of everyday objects!” trope card (which worked well, for all its hammer-over-the-skull directness, in “Blink“), is just… Well, the whole episode feels like it was written for an audience of twenty years ago. Never mind that the premise is old hat in itself, and that film as a cultural and technological concept should long since be demystified; it’s just… hard to relate to a fear of something so specific and (by 2008 standards) so esoteric as old film cans that you might dig up at a rummage sale. How many people do you know who own their own film projectors?

As far as the story itself goes, were those images on the piece of film or not? The young editor claims they weren’t, when he spliced it together. Indeed, they continue to show on his monitor even after the film is unspooled. Yet when the Torchwood team takes the film can, the images do seem to be physically part of the reel. Granted, the story probably isn’t meant for rational breakdown; it’s B-grade mystical faff. Yet it is distracting when a story can’t even get its own internal logic straight.

The bad guys suffer from that ineffectual, poorly-defined TV villain thing. Why do they spend most of the episode looking bored, milling aimlessly through abandoned places? You’d think if they were motivated enough to escape from a bit of celluloid they would want to use their time more efficiently. If the undrownable woman needs or loves water so much, and they’re in Cardiff, why is she squatting around, guzzling from stagnant ponds and lying in bathtubs? They’re right on the Bay! As evidenced in all of those helicopter establishing shots. It’s even salt water, which seems to be her preference!

Julian Bleach is decent, if a bit unchallenged, in his role as the head villain. Going by his Shockheaded Peter stuff, he just seems to be stamping out his trademark performance. It’ll be interesting to see what happens when he has a suit as specific as Davros to fill out.

Anyway. Harmless enough; just kind of irrelevant. Next week‘s looks interesting. From here on it seems like all the continuity guns are going to be blazing, on the road to a snazzy climax for the year. Though I doubt it will ever completely justify itself, this show has on a whole become a very genial piece of television.

Scully, not Gorey

  • Reading time:2 mins read

Changes are afoot for Masterpiece Theater, and MYSTERY! has now been wholly absorbed into it as part of the yearly run. On the interesting side, Gillian Anderson, looking prettier for her age, is the new Dianna Rigg (or Vincent Price, if you go that far back). Appropriate enough! Thing is, they’re talking as if “Masterpiece Mystery!” will now cease to have its own theme music, and will be ditching the Gorey intros for “amazing graphics”. This is all a bit sad, as the Gorey intros have made an enormous and tangible difference in my life. It’s one of those weird little personal nexus things. They helped to define much of my adult artistic sensibility, and they have led somewhat directly to some of my most important personal relationships.

Then again, the “new” Gorey intro has been in place for around twenty years now. Not that it’s in any way dated, I can see how they might be tiiring of it. Since he’s dead, they can’t just commission a new one.

In general, PBS has been rather neglecting MYSTERY! for a while. Whereas it used to be a regular companion series to Masterpiece Theatre, eventually it got folded into the run of its parent series and they ditched the host altogether. I suppose ITV hasn’t been producing cdetective series the way they were in the ’80s and ’90s. Though Poirot is still ongoing, I think Suchet only does a movie every couple of years now. Jeremy Brett is dead. Morse and Cracker are past. Does WGBH even invest in ITV production anymore? Can they afford to, the way PBS is run now?

Master Ham

  • Reading time:5 mins read

Cartmel certainly had the same basic idea as RTD: dial the show back to where he thought it worked best — that being the first six years or so. Mysterious Doctor-as-MacGuffin, developed companion-as-protagonist, more experimental storylines.

The difference is that whereas RTD goes after all this from a populist perspective, by stripping things down and creating a new space, Cartmel was more… well, I wanted to say academic. I guess, that plus brute force. His whole idea was to twist and bend what was already there into a shape that he personally liked better. A relatively clumsy method to reach the same shape.

And yeah, the method seems to mostly be what’s at issue. RTD’s methods tend to engage and inspire, whereas Cartmel’s tend to disgust and confuse. And that is understandable.

Cartmel came to the show as an interested outsider, without much writing experience. Davies was an enormous fan, yet a disciplined (cue the snide remarks) popular dramatist. What Cartmel lacked was the affection for the material that softens Davies’ approach, and the experience to tailor his vision for mass consumption.

On the other hand, Cartmel’s insight is rather cutting and immediate, and it probably would have taken someone like Davies years to come to similar conclusions. Going by Davies’ earlier proposals, it seems to have!

Me, I don’t care so much about how either of them got there; I pretty much agree with their conclusions. I don’t have any investment in the material that they dismiss. I’m not so much interested in execution as the ideas at work, so both eras feel pretty darned similar to me — and hiccups aside, they do feel largely successful in what they set out to do. It’s almost like you could chop out seasons 7-23, and hey presto the show would be consistent.

Which of course is the portion of the show most fandom tends to put on a pedestal, so I can also understand why people would balk at this vision.

Still, hey. I’m with Cartmel. I don’t have the personal attachment. Or rather, what I do have is recent and entirely of my own creation. Whether that means it’s not “my” show or not, I don’t know. I’m just being analytical. It’s what I do. Luckily, I don’t have an army of fans to answer to.

As far as McCoy goes: the role (and the show) hardly calls for dramatic skill; what it demands is a certain off-kilter charisma and warmth. McCoy has more of a “Doctor” (read: professorial, avuncular) persona about him than anyone since Troughton. He’s also the first Doctor since the ’60s to take more of a back seat in the action, which is tremendously welcome after the previous decade and a half of ham.

An aside: Colin Baker is sort of neat in that he wears his bacon right on his sleeves. One can forgive his character his brashness, as he’s so upfront with it — whereas Pertwee and Tom Baker are more covert asses. Here, as with Sherlock Holmes, it’s portrayed as an actual character flaw. Unfortunately, not only did he never get much of a decent script; he never got a decent Watson (or Barbara) to round him off. Not until Big Finish, anyway. And now it seems like Catherine Tate will do something similar for Tennant. But back to the main discussion.

Again, frankly, with a show like classic Doctor Who, why should anyone give a shit about execution? It’s all rather low crap anyway, so it boggles my mind when people go on about the rat like it’s something tortuous and embarrassing in the middle of a piece of serious high drama, or about McCoy rolling his “R”s and garbling his lines as if Ian McKellen in his place would have transformed the show into high art.

There’s nothing objective about something like this. Watching the show is, in the first place, an exercise in transcending a charmingly tatty exterior in search of some warmth and inspiration. When you accept that, arguing about degrees of tattiness is absurd. The lighting and direction and prop and set design was often lousy in the late ’80s? Well, guess what? Twenty years on, it’s pretty hard to tell the difference between a Cartmel-era set and one from the mid-’70s.

Once you’re past the superficialities, all you’re really left with is how interesting you find the things the production team is trying to do, and whether or not you’re fond of the characters.

As far as I’m concerned, anyway, Cartmel was the first period since the ’60s (with maybe exceptions for early Pertwee and the Bidmead season) where someone really tried to do something interesting with the show’s basic premise. Maybe it didn’t always work perfectly; still, the effort is neat to see. And it had the first really well-developed main characters played by likable leads since the ’60s.

And… I mean. I don’t think this is an unreasonable or especially bizarre perspective to take. It’s certainly not an unusual one in my circles. If anything, it strikes me as a result of my lack of long-term nose-to-the-grindstone investment in the show. Which… though not necessarily a superior position seems at least a somewhat more balanced one, compared to the acid or the faux superiority that gets slung about. For whatever that might be worth when making judgments on a tatty twenty-year-old TV show.

Touch Generations

  • Reading time:13 mins read

by [name redacted]

Originally published by Next Generation, under the title “FEATURE: A Short History of Touch”.

A few years ago, Nintendo launched the DS with a vaguely unsettling catch phrase: “Touching is Good”. Their PR team sent disembodied plastic hands to everyone on their mailing list, in the process creeping out Penny Arcade. As creepy and forward as the campaign was, it had a point. Touching historically has been good, for the game industry.

On a whole, videogames are an awfully lonely set of affairs. They paint an alluring well, then give the player rocks to throw, to see what ripples. From Spacewar! to Pong, you’re always shooting or batting or throwing some kind of projectile, to prod the environment. Even in some of the most exploration-heavy games, like Metroid, the only way to progress is to shoot every surface in sight, with multiple weapons. Little wonder art games like Rez are based on the shooter template: it’s about as basic a videogame as you can get. See things, shoot things, you win. If things touch you, you lose. Except for food or possessions, generally you can only touch by proxy; toss coins into the well; ping things, to see how they respond. To see if they break.

Dragon Quest IX: Starry Sky

  • Reading time:2 mins read

It looks like it’s been announced for the Nintendo DS. Which is… pretty big news! I mean, this is one of the most important series in Japan — one of the things that effectively makes a console. Though to be fair, it’s also usually released for the console with the biggest (or projected so) user base. For that to be the DS, instead of a home system… hell. You want to see some paradigms shifted? Here you go.

I’m guessing that Yangus Mysterious Dungeon game was meant as a test for the system, to see if the DS could handle a game roughly on the scale of DQXIII. I’ve not played the former (I don’t think it’s even getting a release over here); I hear it’s pretty darned impressive, for what it is. I’m undecided if I think this DS game is in turn meant as a prototype for a Wii game (as Horii has hinted at in the past), or if he’s trying to say something by moving the series to a portable system. Considering how damned well earlier Dragon Quest games have worked on the Game Boy (way better than on home systems), and considering how much more free time Japanese salarymen have on the train than at home, I’m guessing this might be considered a more efficient format for “timesink” games of this sort. I know I’ve suggested as much in the past. (Hey, is the industry starting to catch up to me?)

Here’s another paradigm: it’s turning into a “communication” game (Wi-Fi enabled), and it seems it’s becoming real-time. So hell, there are a couple more abstractions out of the way — basically the last significant ones remaining in DQXIII. No more turns, and you only control one character. I wonder how this will work out in practice; if players can simply hop into and out of each other’s quests, or if it’s more restricted.

EDIT: Well, there we go. Someone’s writing about it already. And yeah, forgot to mention the Level-5 bit. It’s interesting they’re still tied to the series, considering how eager they are to break out and do their own thing!

Defining the Next Generation

  • Reading time:28 mins read

by [name redacted]

This article was originally intended as a conclusion to NextGen’s 2006 TGS coverage. Then it got held back for two months as an event piece. By the time it saw publication its window had sort of expired, so a significantly edited version went up under the title “What The New Consoles Really Mean”.

So we’re practically there. TGS is well over, the pre-orders have begun; Microsoft’s system has already been out for a year (and is now graced with a few excellent or important games). The generation is right on the verge of turning, and all those expensive electronics you’ve been monitoring for the last few years, half dreading out of thriftiness and secret knowledge that there won’t be anything good on them for a year anyway, will become the new status quo. Immediately the needle will jump and point at a new horizon, set around 2011, and everyone will start twiddling his thumbs again. By the time the drama and dreams resume, I’ll be in my early thirties, another American president will have served nearly a full term – and for the first time in my life I really can’t predict what videogames will be like.

Five That Didn’t Fall

  • Reading time:53 mins read

by [name redacted]

Part nine of my ongoing culture column for Next Generation. After the popularity of my earlier article, I pitched a companion piece about companies that had lived past their remit, yet technically were still with us. On publication we lost the framing conceit and the article was split into five pieces, each spun as a simple bottled history. In turn, some of those were picked up by BusinessWeek Online. Here’s the whole thing, in context.

A few weeks ago we published a list of five developers that made a difference, helped to shape the game industry, then, one way or another (usually at the hands of their parent companies), ceased to exist. One theme I touched on there, that I got called on by a few readers, is that although in practical terms all the listed companies were indeed defunct, several continued on in name (Atari, Sierra, and Origin), living a sort of strange afterlife as a brand detached from its body.

This was an deliberate choice; although Infogrames has been going around lately with a nametag saying “HELLO my name is Atari” – and hey, why not; it’s a good name – that doesn’t make Infogrames the historical Atari any more than the creep in the purple spandex with the bowling ball is the historical Jesus. (Not that I’m relating Infogrames to a fictional sex offender – though he is a pretty cool character.) The question arises, though – what about those companies which live on in both name and body, yet which we don’t really recognize anymore? You know who I’m talking about; the cool rebels you used to know in high school, who you see ten years later working a desk job, or in charge of a bank. You try to joke with them, and they don’t get a word you’re saying. You leave, feeling a mix of fear and relief that (as far as you know) you managed to come out of society with your personality intact.

The same thing happens in the videogame world – hey, videogames are people; all our sins are handed down. This article is a document of five great companies – that started off so well, ready to change the world – that… somehow we’ve lost, even as they trundle on through the successful afterlife of our corporate culture. And somehow that just makes us miss them all the more.

Boundary Scout

  • Reading time:5 mins read

My brother has been hounding me about how to recreate that crazy mysterious glitchy feeling from old NES games, and this whole time I’ve been telling him that I figure it’s impossible. But uh, I guess not!

Apparently the trick is to actually focus on making it seem mysterious and glitchy!

Well, the focus here is on the glitchiness — mostly because I think that would be a cool-n-subversive way of doing things. I think the real point is in the kind of thoughts and emotions and behavior that those glitches trigger in people who are prone to pick at them. I think all of those qualities are very close to the ideal purpose and potential of videogames in general.

It’s that feeling of breaking through the boundaries of an established system — of the suggestion of unknown yet possibly grand potential hidden somewhere beyond the mundane, that you — as a free agent and very clever person — are specially qualified to unlock.

The way a person might break through the boundaries could be mechanical or emotional or intellectual. Some of the best touches in some of the best games borrow from this principle. See the scanning in Metroid Prime, how it comes directly out of the themes at hand, then ties everything together, hinting at a sort of order and coherence and reality to the entire Metroid series and everything in it that you never really suspected before. Yet it never shoves the stuff down your throat; it’s just there for you to put together on your own — much like all of the abstract stuff in the original Zelda and Metroid and whatnot, except deliberate and intellectual rather than incidental and material.

And then there’s Riven.

I think my point with the overt fake-bugginess was to exaggerate and glorify the whole pointless search process that we go through — poking the edges of the scenery, seeing what’s possible within the world, experimenting, and only rarely being rewarded with anything for our effort. And when we are rewarded it feels cloying and false, like those dumb treasure chests that have to be at the end of every single cul de sac in every single dungeon, to overtly reward you for going down and simultaneously make you feel obligated to go down every one.

It’s working on the suggestion that maybe this behavior has a real purpose behind it after all, that sometimes — just sometimes — there’s something magical and special and completely unprecedented to find. And the point to that is to bring into light that whole behavior, that whole mindset — which, again, I think is implicitly what videogames are made to suggest, yet which I don’t feel is often really addressed for all (or even much) of its potential.

I think this mode can be addressed in less gimmicky ways, even if the gimmick is maybe one of the clearest ways to illustrate it. The problem is that a videogame has to work on a couple of levels at once. It needs to have a completely workable status quo, that feels solid, that the player is convinced is meant to be solid, for the player’s subversion of that status quo to mean anything. There’s a lot of psychology here; the player shouldn’t know immediately whether he’s supposed to be able to do what he’s doing, and that it has been accounted for; just that, for whatever reason, he’s able to.

Beyond the psychology and the multiple layers to keep track of, the game of course has to be designed and programmed as well as possible, to avoid unintentional exploits. So there’s a certain level of virtuosity required here.

…

Maybe I’m overstepping the line a bit, in defining the importance of these characteristics. The basic nature of a videogame lies in the causal relationship between the player and the gameworld; the basic potential lies in the narrative ability of that causal relationship (what it means for the player to act, given the established boundaries of the gameworld). The natural mode of player action is to explore those rules and challenge them. I suppose it doesn’t follow that the player need subvert a status quo as-such; it’s just, this is a good way to illustrate that mode of player interaction and its narrative and emotional potential.

The player should feel free; that he is at all times in control over his immedate decisionmaking, and that through his decisions he is just perhaps blazing into unknown territory, doing something nobody else has done, having a unique and visceral personal experience that’s entirely generated by his own free will. Half-Life 2 is great at making the player feel clever and subversive for doing exactly what the game is expecting.

I think it’s a misdiagnosis of this quality that has led to this sandbox nonsense (most recently reined in and made less inane by Dead Rising), and sense that players want “freedom” in their games.

…

I’ll get back to this. Will post what I’ve got now.

Tying into the previous post, sort of…

  • Reading time:2 mins read

I also think it’s a bland way of explaining the eighth’s regeneration – “Oh he died in a war”. I like to think of the Time War as a bit more complex than that.

I believe the word you want is “mythic”. That’s one of the big reasons for the War being there: it creates a new myth, putting everyone — old and new viewers — on the same level, and suggesting unrecountably grand and mysterious things, creating a new wonder, a new quest for knowledge, a new drive for the show to realign it with its original appeal. Also, curiously enough, the War serves to “fix” the arguably unsatisfactory resolution to a lot of the original mysteries by ditching the Time Lords and Gallifrey, the revelation of which earmarked the end of the show’s original era, and the start of something arguably less intriguing.

Doctor Who’s about the travel; not the destination. Soon as you stop and resolve something, it becomes real; mundane. The magic’s gone, as is any driving force it provided. Which isn’t to imply that you can’t create a new driving force — since that’s just what Davies did. And what ho; it worked.

I just don’t know if fact can do any better than legend, for something like this.

A completely unsaleable idea

  • Reading time:3 mins read

A vague concept came to me a couple of hours ago:

Take a game that, ostensibly is… this one thing; it’s of a particular genre, with certain goals — and it’s entertaining enough, if mired in its genre and a little buggy. If you’re so prone, you can poke away at the seams all over the place, and get effects that probably aren’t intended. The first model that came to me was something like a…

Side note: Wi-Fi DS or Wii Pictionary could be interesting. Not for this, necessarily; just had the thought.

Anyway. Something like a video board game; an adaptation of a very famous Game of Life clone that you’ve never heard of, or a Mario Kart or Mario Party clone. Something vapid and small in imagination and ambition, though diverting. The kind of trash that builds up on the store shelves and you never think about, though maybe with a little more personality and irony about itself.

Then if the player happens to be bored enough — happens to keep picking away at the discrepancies, at the bugs and exploits, happens to keep veering out of bounds, he’ll wind up… out-of-bounds. And then the real game will begin. If not, the dippy little game, with its goals and rules, is all you’ll ever see.

As for what’s out there, I don’t know. It could start off just seeming like an error — the Metroid Secret World sort of effect. Random garbage that it’s interesting to screw with. Then keep picking through the garbage, and eventually there’s something grander beneath that. Like you’ve just emerged from a dungeon into the blinding sunshine. And it just keeps getting more and more mysterious. There’s no explanation for any of this; you have to piece it together on your own, through exploring and continually picking away at the edges of what’s possible and observing and filing things away in your head.

What would be even better is if the initial part of the game had some kind of license — say, a videogame version of Jeopardy! or some other known quantity — to further cover up what’s really going on.

And then put the game out and say nothing. And see how long before someone finds the secret, and word begins to spread. Then see the noise grow and grow, and paranoia develop about the glitches in every other game under the sun, as people wonder if they lead to anything secret and special — the way we used to, twenty years ago when we didn’t know any better.

…

I don’t know. I think it would be kind of neat. If impractical. It would require a Kenji Eno or some other funster, to take charge then sit in the background and not be credited.