progressive design

The Death of Design

  • Reading time:2 mins read

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

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

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

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

Kenji Eno

  • Reading time:5 mins read

Man. This is making me feel a little weird.

If you’re reading this blog, you know how I am with videogames; this deep-seated ambivalence. I love what they can be, but I tend to hate what they are. There’s a small handful of designers out there who I think have the right ideas or the right attitude, that could actually make something of this form if people just listened to what they said.

One of the top tier is Kenji Eno. He retired in a huff about 13 years ago. Since then I doubt a month has gone by when I haven’t wondered if he’s going to ever design another game. Every few years he has threatened to, and he very nearly did something for the Wii. (EDIT: Looks like he actually followed through, on a smaller scale.) His final game, D2, is sometimes my favorite game for the Dreamcast, which is in turn my favorite game system and the last bastion of progressive design in the mainstream industry.

The man was avant-garde in an era when videogames never ever were. He couldn’t follow a straight formula if his life depended on it. He’d get bored and depressed at the suggestion, and then go make a sound-only game for blind people, or… something like this:

1UP: What can you tell us about Short Warp, the wild minigame collection you made for 3DO?

KE: This was the funkiest game!

1UP: And it even came packaged with a free condom. Were you trying to get gamers to have more sex? Because when we see used copies in stores, the condom is always unused and unopened.

KE: That’s sad. [Laughs] This game was made when I was almost on the edge. My mental status was getting very unbalanced, so I wanted to balance myself back by creating a game like this. I was thinking, “If I’m going to create a game like this, I should do something really crazy.” And that’s how I came up with the idea of this game, and that’s why I included a condom. However, I had to make it limited because the packaging was expensive because it came packed with a condom, so the physical dimensions of the package got thicker, and there weren’t any packages like that. So the manufacturing fee jumped up, and condoms weren’t cheap either, so it was expensive to manufacture the games. If I manufactured too many units, I was going to be deep in the red. So that’s why I limited the units.

1UP: How many units did you make?

KE: 10,000, and I hand-numbered all of the packages myself.

The man was an auteur and a rock star, and the game industry didn’t know what to do with him. After a certain point he got fed up with the scene and returned to his first calling, music.

He was only 42 when he died. Which means he was 29 when he retired from game design. He was 20 when he got his start with the sound design to a Famicom prot of Altered Beast. He was 25 when he delivered his breakout game, D. His entire career spanned just a decade, from scutwork through superstardom to sidelining and burnout. In amongst there he met and influenced and was influenced by the likes of Goichi Suda and Fumito Ueda. And he also pissed people off — not without good reason, or fair warning.

I was very mad at Sony. When I released D on the PlayStation, Acclaim was to publish it. So the sales people gathered orders for a 100,000 units, but Sony had given their other titles manufacturing priority. So Sony told me that they had only manufactured 40,000 units, and I was very mad about that . . . . So I was talking to a guy at Sony, and this was toward the end of the year, and I said, “OK, I’m going to go to [Japanese electronics retailer] Bic Camera, and if I don’t see my game there, I’m going to punch you.” and they said, “No don’t worry about it. It’s going to be there.” And I went to Bic Camera and didn’t find it, so I actually did punch this guy — so that should tell you how mad I was.

And so now he’s dead. And an era is passed. Be that as it may, surely his effort must have had some effect. Fifteen years and a couple of abysmal console launches later, surely the field is changed somewhat?

Well. Look at that; a new PlayStation.

Here’s the short version.

Yoshida: What do you mean, people aren’t buying game consoles? People still buy consoles. All we have to do is bring people games that they want to play, and they will buy our console. That doesn’t mean original or exclusive games, and we certainly don’t need new voices or intend to publish anything too outside the norm — but I am confident that the games that happen to materialize on our system will make people want to own it.

…

So okay. He probably wouldn’t have made another game on the scale of what came before. And if he did, it would have made only a small impact — and far too late to turn this ship around. You can’t fight entropy. Not with a hundred Enos. It’s foolish, really. Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try, or hope.

It’s not his voice that I’ll miss; it’s the potential that he represented. It’s the fact that guys like Eno are out there in the world, and that just sometimes they have an effect — either directly or by proxy. And now there’s one fewer. And the world is poorer for it.

Thanks to Amandeep Jutla and Frank Cifaldi.