Before you read on, head over to the Wither page and give it a go (Windows-only, Mac users will have to run Parallels/VMWare/Boot Camp). The game can be finished in 5-10 minutes. If you’re not the kind who cares about spoilers, then please, read on…

On its surface Wither won’t grab most players. It visually borrows the cabbage-green Game Boy aesthetic of the 80′s and 90′s, the sounds are lifted from other games, the gameplay isn’t much of an improvement upon Pokémon Red, there are no battles to speak of, the story is small and unambitious, and its earnest 8-bit melodies hardly stir up a sense of grandeur.

But even a few minutes of the delightfully simple yet otherworldly dialogue disturbs me from any of these criticisms. Wither’s charm comes from the tiny, almost unnoticeable details that unsettle me. When I sit down on the bed, I am prompted with YOU HAVE A NIGHTMARE. The phrase prepares me for a journey into a desolate underworld littered with the skulls and carcasses of animals, juxtaposed with beautiful flowers.The music reminds me of the kind played in funeral homes: synthesized organs echoing the somber mood that call me back to memories of a dead loved one. The grey/green-scale artwork embraces a monochromatic world, as a story about guilt and depression quickly emerges. The lighthearted Game Boy-esque experience manages a perfect disharmony with its sober tone. But all of these elements are crafted together with subtlety, and the author doesn’t beat us over the head with cheap metaphors or sentiment.

What separates Wither from games like Jason Rohrer’s Passage that try to grapple with the same kinds of human existential problems? Passage tries to mechanically represent emotion through gameplay (e.g. walking forward in time and watching one’s loved one age and die) that leaves absolutely no room for interpretation. In contrast, through strangely poetic moments like having bizarre nightmares and witnessing suicides, Wither leaves the protagonist’s psychological world open to interpretation.

If it is clear to the player that at some point the protagonist has reached the Farthest Shore (quite literally – via a boat) in search of her/his loved one, just what this means is open for debate. How should one deal with personal tragedy? Does losing someone mean losing one’s own life too? Or is there a way of coming back to the world of the living after making this crossing? The game was never intended to address (or answer) existential questions, but the fact that I can entertain these questions after playing through Rastek’s “poetic-prose” is a recognition of Wither’s minimalistic expressive power. Wither is, by design or by accident, far more artistic than any game that advertises itself as such.

Note: Melly Tan has a much more extended and articulate write-up on Wither that I could only dream of writing myself. I strongly suggest heading over to Meridian Dance and reading her article if you’ve played the game and are craving more analysis.

Homecoming: False Memory or Truth?

How is it that we can experience homecoming in a completely new game? Conventional psychological theory tells us that memories are like photographic images stored somewhere in the brain, and when we have a memory of something that we could not have possibly experienced in our lifetime, that it is a “false memory”. Similarly, when someone hearkens back to a childhood that seems altogether rose-tinted, we accuse them of nostalgia for a past that never really existed. In both cases there is heavy emphasis upon the idea that what is “true” or “real” about our memories is that they correctly represent what “actually” happened in the past. When we let sentimental/romantic feelings like comfort and familiarity take us over, the memories we have are distorted by those feelings.

An Imagined Childhood

But that does not help to explain how and why homecoming feels real to us, and how a brand new game can send our hearts back to a past that we may not have even experienced for ourselves. Most recently, I had that feeling playing Mount & Blade: Warband. The first hour of Warband was like being sent back to the early 1990′s, playing Sid Meier’s Pirates! I am not the first person to comment on the many similarities between Warband and Pirates! (some even sneer ‘It is just Pirates! with horses and castles’). But it wasn’t just the gameplay that reminded me of Sid Meier’s original creation, it was the entire expressive style of Warband that made me feel like I was back home, huddled around an old 286 with a couple of my buddies, doing our damndest to haul ass back to Antigua with a frigate full of illicit booty.

The thing is, I never owned Pirates! back in the 1990′s. But a couple of my friends did own the game, and they would regale me with tales of buccaneering and swashbuckling on the high seas. They would hang out together in a bedroom during those balmy junior high school summers, glued to the computer and taking turns in the hot seat until the wee hours of the morning. At least, that is how I imagine it. And for all intents and purposes, that’s what growing up on a farm in western Canada was all about in the 90′s: weeks of boredom punctuated by days of intense gaming with your closest friend. (Or, in my case, with my sister).

In actuality, I didn’t play Pirates! Gold until 1998 on my Pentium-133. I played it by myself, in my lonely single-bedroom apartment. No story there.

So: I have this feeling of homecoming when I play Mount & Blade: Warband that hearkens back to a childhood that I did not “actually” live, but I feel like I should have lived. If we listen to the average social psychologist, I sound like an irreparably damaged person who can’t distinguish between their imagination and their recollections.

But if we take a much different approach to memory, what appears to be childish nostalgia is instead a powerful disclosure of the essence of gaming. Phenomenologist and philosopher Gaston Bachelard, thinking about our encounters with bird nests, writes that homecoming “takes us back to our childhood or, rather, to a childhood; to the childhoods we should have had.  For not many of us have been endowed by life with the full measure of its cosmic implications.”

Homecoming as Re-inhabiting the Past

Let’s face it: most of us, in actuality, squandered youthhood on terrible console games and even worse TV shows and music. But the youthhood of the adult, the one that I experience now as I play games in a way that I should have when I was a teenager, creates new memories and new experiences. When I feel homecoming in a great game, I do not fabricate my childhood (as the social psychologist thinks), but I re-imagine what being-at-home felt like as a boy, and lend my childhood over to the experience that I am making with the game.

If that is true – that my childhood is changing and revealing new truths about me as I play games – then we do not interpret games: games interpret us.

When I was fourteen years old, I bought the complete Dungeons and Dragons Basic Set from my older teenaged neighbour for $10 (including colour changing dice!). I remember shaking with anticipation as I got home, imagining all of the amazing adventures that my friends and I would go on together. When I got home, I called three of my closest friends up and asked them if they wanted to come over and play a game of D&D together. The response was less than enthusiastic, and the game ended up collecting dust on my bookshelf, along with a dozen-or-so character sheets that I laboriously worked on.

I grew up in a time and place where the word “D&D” was tantamount to declaring yourself a sexless nerd, loner or devil worshipper to the entire junior high school. It was the early 1990′s, and the intense popularity of Dungeons and Dragons in the 70s and 80s was wearing off fast. The idea of sitting around a table with a few buddies and calling up fantasied worlds with a roll of the dice was coming up against the harsher realities of grunge music and the gulf war. The farm town I grew up in was predominantly Catholic. Films like Mazes and Monsters starring Tom Hanks (a teenager who suffers from psychosis and starts to live out his D&D character in real life), and the religious backlash of the 1980s against D&D was firmly embedded in the memories of parents and us kids.

In this article I consider the major comeback, at least in my life and those people around me, that pen’n'paper roleplaying games are making, and consider the repercussions that this will have for how the youth of today will experience future cRPGs.

1990: CRPGs Emerge in the Golden Age

To fill that gap, I turned to computer role playing games like the Ultima series, the Quest for Glory series, Wing Commander: Privateer, Betrayal at Krondor, and (years later) Fallout. These were games that had strong central characters who were on quests to save the world, involved dark and esoteric forms of magic or skilfulness, and demanded an imaginative leap from the player. I had to identify and empathize with the characters of the world if I was going to devote dozens of hours to saving it, and this gaming fulfilled a gigantic imaginative and moral gap in my life as a teenager, allowing me to explore dangerous or taboo topics in a safe manner. These games, while not particularly approved of by most parents and friends (I am sure that my parents worried at how many evenings I spent with Ultima VIII: Pagan), at least were too new to have acquired the stigma that D&D had. If the 1980s was the decade of pen’n'paper gaming, the 1990s was the decade of the CRPG.

(This is fairly consistent with the timeline that Matt Barton draws up in Dungeons & Desktops: The History of Computer Role-Playing Games. Barton argues that the late 1980′s and early 1990′s usher in a “Golden Age” of computer and console roleplaying games.)

Being a teenager during the Golden Age of CRPGs meant that I was in an awkward spot – I was part of a generation who bridged the older pen’n'paper tradition with a new CRPG-literate generation of gamers. I learned some of the language of role-playing through fantasy books, some through my brief flirts with the D&D Basic Set, and most through the dominant CRPGs of that time. My understanding of an RPG was that it was part imagination, but mostly set in a world of characters and places that were pre-determined by the author or designer. Sure, they could come up with non-linear ways of telling a story (i.e. Wing Commander: Privateer follows a largely player-directed story arc) but the content of the game was largely predetermined. Or, if the plot was predeterminate, I might focus on customizing my character and focusing on certain skills and abilities that I found important, such as my Magic User in Quest for Glory. If the game were particularly involving I might invest myself emotionally in the quest by imagining myself into the role of the Avatar or hero, making moral choices that reflected the character whom I wanted to ‘play’. But lost in all of this was the participatory storytelling that made pen’n'paper roleplaying games truly unique.

CRPG Becomes the Norm

What emerged in the late 90′s and early 2000′s was a CRPG-literate crowd of gamers with very specific expectations about what a roleplaying game is. We wanted games with statistics – lots of ‘em. We wanted games with all kinds of open-ended exploration. We wanted games that let us customize our character’s abilities. We wanted party-based adventuring, even though 4 of the 5 party members were computer-controlled. We wanted epic stories that took dozens of hours to complete, each replete with subquests or sidequests to keep us entertained while on the “main” quest.

But lost in this emerging literacy were the original pen’n'paper games that created the metaphors for gameplay that CRPGs aped algorithmically. Kids born in the mid-1990′s have grown up in a world where Dungeons and Dragons no longer carries any meaning beyond being a particular brand of computer role-playing games. Many of the teenagers in our “Art Guild” after-school program are very literate when it comes to playing computer games, but the idea of playing a pen’n'paper adventure seems quaintly confusing to them. Like driving around in your Ford Model-T when you have a Porsche sitting in the garage.

Discovering that the Old is New

Of course, D&D has not remained dormant for the last 30 years. In fact, there are probably more pen’n'paper systems available today than there ever were. So for the last few years, my wife and I have had the great fortune to have participated in a number of campaigns – some as DM, some as players – from Deadlands to Planescape to a re-imagining of Ultima VIII: Pagan. Each time we play, I am struck by the rich and complex social scene that plays out before us.

A few weeks ago I brought in a D&D Basic Set to the Art Guild, and asked a handful of teenagers if they wanted to “play a real role-playing game”. Only one of them had played a pen’n'paper game before, and the rest were curious but totally unfamiliar with D&D. So we sat down, rolled up some very basic character sheets, and began our journey.

DM: “You are standing on a 30-foot high cobblestone wall.”

Player 1: “Why?”

DM: “I’m not sure. You hear the sound of a gong behind you, along with villagers screaming ‘get him!’ and ‘he’s on top of the wall!’

Player 2: “What do I do?”

DM: “I’m not sure. What do you want to do?”

Player 2: “Ummm. What are my options?”

DM: “Well, the wall is a 30 foot drop. You figure that you might be able to climb down if you take your time. There are handholds in the rough cobblestone.”

Player 2: “I want to climb down then.”

DM: “Give me a roll on your D20.”

Player 3: “Which one is the D20?”

And so on.

Three hours later, they had been assaulted by guards dressed in red gowns, fled down a steep switchback mountain path, clung for their lives after falling off the steep sides of the path, got lost in a forest, were assailed by pygmies, and buried a skeleton that they found laying alongside the road. In each of these situations, the characters found themselves arguing over complex issues of trust, greed, courage, friendship and disloyalty. They bargained with one another, joked and teased one another, and learned to tread the fine line between what is ‘in game’ (their character) and what is ‘out of game’ (themselves).

At an individual level, I noticed that each player learned how to communicate their actions and express their thoughts in a much more clear and articulate manner than usual. Ambiguous speech acts like “I walk into the dark forest” were usually met with clarifications from the DM “Well, which direction? In front of you? Do you have a light?” or sometimes with outright remonstrations from the DM, “You walk into the dark forest without a light. You are now lost.”

I also noticed that a few players also took risks that they would have never taken in real life. Stealing something from another person would be impossible for most of these teenagers, but in the game they were able to explore iniquitous acts without serious repercussion. They learned, for instance, that a character needs a motivational space that makes sense of their action – they can’t just walk off the side of a mountain without a sensible reason, or commit an act of evil without some kind of moral context.

Recovering a Tradition

What I am beginning to appreciate is that there is a new generation of CRPGers, who were previously unfamiliar with D&D that are just becoming familiar with pen’n'paper games. Judging by the two three-hour sessions that I have played with the teenagers from the Art Guild, D&D is by far the most successful group activity we have had in 7 months. Already several of them want to learn how to DM and create their own worlds, and take other players out on adventures.

The upshot of this, I hope, is that this new generation of gamers – who are now playing pen’n'paper games – will create a desire to completely revitalize the idea of a CRPG. I don’t think that we need another Baldur’s Gate. I think we need to recapture the vitality and rich social space enacted in pen’n'paper sessions. Designers of the future need to remember that role-playing games are primarily played with friends and involve working out complex social relationships that exist outside of the game. I think that we need CRPGs that aren’t about “choosing moral option A or B”, but rather about having the player ask themselves, “what kind of character is s/he? Would s/he do this?”

Games like Mass Effect 2 and BioShock have returned us to the original problem of telling a story in a coherent manner, while inviting input from the player, but still have not addressed the more fundamental problem that an RPG involves: learning how to clarify one’s own decisions and emotions within a safe, bounded, environment.

I appreciate that CRPGs have become their own modes of expression with standards of their own that do not refer back to pen’n'paper games. But, judging by the quality of the RPG sessions I have participated in, they could still learn a thing or ten. I hope that this new generation of gamers creates a desire for richer CRPGs – games that are more connected to the human feeling and morality that is expressed in the average pen’n'paper session.

In recent years, Floyd dying in the Biolab has become a touchstone for gaming emotion. It is now often cited as a critical moment in the developmental path of gaming, along with (of course) Aerith dying in Final Fantasy VII. (For instance – in the comments area of 11 Nerdy Moments Guaranteed to Make You Cry a few people mention Floyd and effectively put it on the same spectrum as Spock dying in Star Trek and Gandalf dying in Lord of the Rings.) Character death is now a celebrated aspect of the gamer mythos. In this article I take apart what I see as false nostalgia that has sanctified one of the least important parts of Planetfall at the cost of missing the one thing that makes Planetfall stand out as one of the most important text adventures of today.

(If you care about “spoilers”, and haven’t, in the last 27 years taken the time to play Planetfall – now might be a good time to stop reading and start playing.)

Not a lot was said about this moment back in the 1980s. In fact, other than the occasional “Floyd was really cool”, almost nothing was said about Floyd prior to the emergence of the post-2005 gamer/nerd aesthetic. Even James A. McPherson’s (1984) Computer Gaming World review (p. 44) paints Floyd in a somewhat ambivalent light, suggesting that he is (at first) an annoyance, which the reviewer slowly grew to see as a companion.

... You will meet a robot named Floyd. In the beginning, Floyd might be a nuisance because of his incessant babbling, but as you have probably already guessed he plays an important part in the completion of the game. Floyd's interaction is a very unique
concept in this game. It adds animation to the game without relying on graphics. (In certain parts of the complex I had already mapped I found myself hurrying through the
rooms. As this left Floyd far behind, I ended up slowing down to wait for Floyd to catch up.)

... The addition of Floyd the robot as your part- ner is a unique boost to the interactive nature of these games and I hope to see more of this type of creative innovation in future games.

Maybe McPherson did not want to ruin the ending for new players, but I don’t see anything approaching the histrionics of gamers today who think back to dear little Floyd. Floyd hardly figures into the review any more than an interesting gameplay innovation. What I’m getting at is that gamers have come, through a combination of blind personal nostalgia and participation within a cloistered gamer culture, to exaggerate the meaning of what is a highly overrepresented aspect of Planetfall. Floyd is not a compelling character, and barely amounts to a loyal dog that stays by your side throughout.

What I’m trying to say is that the vast majority of gamers have missed out on the most important part of the game.

Microcosmicity

The philosopher and phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard has something to say about “cosmicity” – the inconceivable vastness of the universe that we experience when we encounter a cosmic poetic image – in say, a poem. The first stanza of William Blake’s oft-quoted poem Auguries of Innocence is a standard example:

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.

For Bachelard, perceiving infinitude in the miniature is essential to the growth of consciousness. Our world – quite literally – becomes larger as we imagine cosmic vastness. Simultaneously, as we perceive things in miniature, the geometrically tiny encloses something impossibly large. The examples of this today are innumerable – especially in childrens’ popular culture: Basil the Hare freely commiserates with the mice of Redwall Abbey in Brian Jacques’ Redwall series, Tuck Pendleton of Innerspace is miniaturized (along with his spaceship) and injected into a man’s body, or when Flynn is digitized and inserted into the ENCOM mainframe in Tron. In all of these, a leap of the imagination is necessary: I know that Basil is literally 50 times the size of Matthias in Redwall, but I imagine them to live in the same space. The imagination makes literal impossibilities fictional realities. And for Bachelard, who sees the imagination and consciousness as malleable parts of our human makeup, imagining the impossibly infinite is an expansion of our way of being in the world.

Becoming The Grain of Sand

Where does Planetfall fit in this? It is one of the few games that seamlessly integrates microcosmicity into its experience… so much so that the player can feel the mutual intimacy of the miniature and the vast. The scene happens after Floyd has retrieved the miniaturization card for you and died for his efforts. To get off the island, you must first fix a problem with the computer – there is a fault at Relay Station 384 on the computer’s motherboard. Here is what happens:

You - and the laser beam you carry - climb into a miniaturization booth and are shrunken to a being just a few microns across. The computer's circuit board becomes a gigantic maze of highways and platforms - copper traces, junctions and gates. Wielding the laser, you walk over to a nearby relay station and fire several times at a gigantic meteorite, sitting between the relay and the rest of the circuit, preventing it from functioning. The meteorite - an infinitesimal spec of dust to the naked eye - dwarfs you. You walk back to the entrance and encounter a microbe hell-bent on eating you alive. You fire at the microbe relentlessly, and your laserbeam has no effect on the montrosity. The laser is growing hot in your hands. Finally, frustrated, you throw your laser over the side of the platform and the microbe chases after it into oblivion. You run back to the entrance, and you are re-atomized into your former size. All of this happens in a few nanoseconds.

Experiencing Games

Compare my description above of what I see as the most important scene in the game – of being de-atomized and shrunken, destroying a particle of dust with a laser, and being chased by a gigantic microbe – to the oft-spoken sentiment “Floyd’s death made me sad.” I don’t dispute that Floyd’s death was saddening – what I dispute is that his death carries much significance for us as people. I don’t think about Floyd at night, before I go to bed.

What I do imagine is being shrunken to the size of a butterfly’s eyelash, and running around in a labyrinth of tunnels and junctions. In other words, the simple emotion of sadness does not lead me anywhere new – it is just what it is. But microcosmicity… the experience of vastness in an impossible small space… is a new experience and opens me up to new kinds of imagining.

“My son. He’s such a geek”, my mother ribbed at me in her familiar Québéçoise accent. She flipped over the jewel case in my hands and looked at the back cover, and shook her head.

I looked up at the cashier, my eyes pleading for some way out of this. She giggled instead, and I blushed. I gave my mother an “Aw mom!” look.

I was 15 years old, and we were standing at the checkout of a London Drugs store in the city. The store carried everything, from diapers and bee-sting kits, to Polaroid cameras and Froot Loops. I was here for the computer games.

The back of the store had a bargain shelf lined with computer games..most of them were crap shareware titles like PKWare Utilities and the occasional decent Crazy Nick’s Software Picks: Robin Hood’s Game of Skill and Chance. Among the rows of CD’s and floppies, a Dynamix logo on a white jewel case caught my eye. It was a game I had never heard of before, and it was on CD-ROM! A talkie adventure game. For $19.99. I rescued The Adventures of Willy Beamish from the shelf and carried it back to the cashier like a sacrificial offering.

At the time, my mother didn’t understand. She probably hoped that my crazy obsession with games would pass.. along with saturday morning cartoons and remote control cars. Or maybe she thought it was just another game that I would play for a couple of hours and lose interest in.

But it was a Sierra game. It had Sierra artwork and Sierra music. I played Willy Beamish for months. I relished the stunning artwork and expressive animation. I had never seen a game before – other than Dragon’s Lair – that had every character hand-animated in each scene (instead of using a repeated walk animation). The rich (256) colour palette rotated with night and day. For a nerdy fifteen year-old living on a farm in the middle of nowhere, Willy Beamish’s little suburban neighbourhood and treehouse was a real place to hide out in. The art, the animation, the music and voices, all conspired to create a place for daydreaming.

Fast-forward 15 years. I get a call from a friend of mine, Eriq Chang, whose artwork I featured in an article some time ago. Apparently – for several years – Sierra enthusiasts Brandon Klassen and Eriq Chang, have been secretly working on an Art Book that tells the graphical history of Sierra On-Line adventure games. Eriq would not tell me any more than “we’ll send you some teasers before launch.”

In this article, Brandon Klassen tells us just what The Art of Sierra is, and what the project means for him personally. Brandon and Eriq have generously sent me two promotional teaser shots of the upcoming book (included, see below), and let me tell you: I can’t fucking wait.

CL: So Brandon, what is The Art of Sierra?

BK: The Art of Sierra has been a dream I’ve been waiting to see realized for the past 6 years, and I’m so excited that we’re finally unveiling the project! It’s a visual history of Sierra’s adventure games – a hardcover, oversized coffee table art book filled with an unprecedented amount of rare Sierra art and a wealth of behind-the-scenes material. This is the journey that every Sierra fan has been waiting to take, and we can’t wait for fans to be able to hold this book and flip through it, to remember the magic that happened every time the Sierra logo and fanfare lit up their computer screens!

CL: Who got the AoS project started, and what got things off the ground in the first place?

BK: The genesis of The Art of Sierra was late in 2003 when I was helping manage Ken Williams’ site, SierraGamers.com. Ken had been posting some low resolution scans of King’s Quest design material on the site, and I knew that there had to be a better way to present this rare material! Ken agreed that it would make sense to have someone scan a lot of his material in high resolutions for posterity and, at the same time, I was able to get in touch with Al Lowe, who also had material he was willing to have scanned.

I actually only met with Ken and Roberta briefly, and was soon busily scanning. I don’t think I’d ever done so much scanning in my life – little did I know how much scanning was ahead!

I had a day of scanning at Al Lowe’s house – the most memorable thing about meeting Al was that he made me a chipotle sandwich and iced tea for lunch! It was winter, and Al has quite a steep driveway, so we started to get a bit worried when it started snowing. Luckily, I wrapped up all the scanning before the weather got too bad. Al has some truly historic Sierra materials, including some top secret stuff he wouldn’t let me scan – I can’t even talk about it, I’ve been sworn to secrecy!

Around the same time, I also met with the other Al, Al Eufrasio. Al, like Al, is an incredibly funny guy. He’s an animator who did a lot of work with Al on Larry 7 and Torin’s Passage, so we have a lot of fantastic stuff from him.

One of the first things I knew I had to do was invite my close friend and collaborator Eriq Chang to join the project. Eriq’s a prominent industry artist who happens to be one of the most devoted Sierra fans you’ll ever meet. He’s also done quite a bit of design work in the adventure community. We share an obsessive love for Sierra and we’ve worked together on a number of game development projects. There was no question that I had to have Eriq design and write the book with me, and he instantly understood my vision for the project and knew how to bring it to life.

The project grew from there as we started connecting with other fellow collectors and began to get in touch with more artists and designers who worked at Sierra, and that’s brought us to where we are today!

CL: How much of the book is devoted to the history of Sierra versus Sierra artwork?

BK: It’s interesting you should ask that, because it’s not an entirely straightforward distinction! From rough sketches, to painted backgrounds, to in-game art, to the game boxes and supplemental material, the “art” of Sierra is completely interwoven with the history of the adventure game and the computer game industry. The artwork will definitely be prominent, but just as exciting for fans will be the interviews and history that the book will include. Sierra was very much about the “art” of not only constantly innovating but also making fans a part of the Sierra family, which is why Sierra’s games were so successful and loved.

CL: Who is involved in the Art of Sierra project?

BK: In terms of writing and designing the book, it’s completely Eriq and myself, as mentioned. We have a very specific vision for the book that we know fans are going to love, so we really want to maintain the integrity of that vision. The way that this project has come together, we know it’s something that’s just meant to be. It’s not just been about making the book – it’s meeting the artists and designers, compiling and archiving material, and making this an “experience” for fans that pays tribute to Sierra, in as memorable a way as Sierra would have done themselves back in the day. Eriq and I are both diehard Sierra fans, and we’re both industry professionals. As a result, we have a very stylized, specific idea of how we want to present the art. I’ve worked as an editor with Babylon 5 Books, which started as a script publication team for J. Michael Straczynski’s science fiction TV series, I’ve done music reviews and interviews for national and international press outlets, and, when I’ve had time, I’ve enjoyed interviewing comic artists from Jeff Smith to Paul Gulacy. My passion for The Art of Sierra really comes from my passion for stories and the joy I find in artwork.

If you’ve seen any of Eriq’s work, it’s really second to none. He’s done game packaging, posters, game illustration and background design. He’s done amazing work over the years with projects for Dreamworks and film collectibles for the “Nightmare on Elm Street” series. More recently, he worked with Sierra designer Christy Marx on a gorgeous, hardcover limited edition book for a Slipgate Ironworks MMO project. There’s just way too much other stuff to even begin to list. If there’s one person I trust to bring together the vision for this project, it’s Eriq!

Enough about us though! All the material you’ll see in the book comes from former Sierra staff as well as fans with private collections. I’ll mention a few people, but we have a full contributors list that’s still growing on ArtOfSierra.com, so make sure to check it out. While the book is entering production, we’re still open to contributions – we don’t want to leave anyone out of this once in a lifetime celebration. The contributors have been really fantastic. Some people send us their work to scan, while others scan their work for us. Brad Herbert, a Sierra fan with a truly impressive collection, has been one of our biggest supporters and really a major collaborator. He’s been instrumental in the development of our promotional video work and a lot of the more detailed background artwork acquisition. We have unbelievable art from Sierra legends like Andy Hoyos, Marc Hudgins, Josh Mandel… Christy Marx is providing us with beautiful work from the late Peter Ledger. In particular, Dynamix artists Shawn Sharp and Rhonda Conley have provided us with a lot of material. They were two of the first artists to jump onboard the project, and so I’ve been particularly grateful for their support. I should mention that we’re also including art from Dynamix games.

CL: You’ve been actively involved in the Sierra adventure scene for quite some time. What is your relationship with AGD Interactive [the developers responsible for the excellent remakes of King's Quest I, II and Quest for Glory II]?

BK: Looking back, it’s been very important to me over the years to be involved in various parts of the Sierra fan community, whether that was at SierraGamers.com, AGDI or other projects. In AGDI’s early days, I did some web development for them, and then I went on to do some 3D work with the King’s Quest 2 remake opening cinematic and parts of the AGDI logo movie.
Since then, I’ve been involved with AGDI in various capacities, mostly with team management and design as well as some programming and touch-up art and animation.

CL: Tell me a bit more about yourself.  You’re Canadian, eh? (sigh, sorry).

BK: Yes, I’m Canadian! I live near Vancouver, BC, just a few hours north of Seattle. A lot of Sierra artists and designers are in the Seattle area, which really made it the perfect place to base the project out of. And Eriq’s recently moved from San Francisco to Seattle to make it possible for The Art of Sierra to enter production – he actually bought a house up here which serves as our second studio for Fable Foundry Publishing.

I grew up fascinated with special effects, and I loved art books and “Making of” movie books. I must have asked for that heavy ILM book, “The Art of Special Effects,” for Christmas when I was 10. I always wished that such books would be written about computer games, but the most in-depth “Making of” that computer games ever got were small sections in strategy guides.

I have a modest art book collection – Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Miyazaki, Drew Struzan, Charles Vess, the list goes on and on – all film and comic book stuff, but computer games just don’t get recognized as art. There are so many game companies that must have amazing archives of artwork, and hardly any of it is ever seen, with only occasional exceptions. The World of Warcraft art books, for example, and independent studio Dreams and Visions Press recently did an amazing job with The Art of Tomb Raider – I actually did a very high resolution photo mockup of those books for them to use in their promotions, before the books were printed. But these are the exceptions, and in the case of a company like Sierra, a company that no longer exists, it seemed like no such book could ever be written. Fans know the horror story of Sierra’s demise, years of archived artwork – and not just artwork, but the very history of the computer game industry – being thrown away when the company closed its Oakhurst facility.

How can anything ever make up for that lost history? Adventure games went out of fashion, but Sierra fans have continued to love the adventures that inspired them and their families, and the magic has never died. Now, against all odds, we’ve been given the chance to preserve and celebrate the history of a company that created the graphic adventure genre, a company that grew from a story at a kitchen table to a household name for family friendly entertainment. I can’t even express how exciting that is!

CL: Eriq and I have spent hours talking about how important our early experiences with graphical adventure games were to forming our childhoods. Tell me about your first Sierra adventure experience. I’d like to know why you’re so devoted to a major project like this.

BK: Oh wow, where to start? Growing up, my family didn’t have a TV and we didn’t have a Nintendo, or any other game console. But we had a computer. My love for computers became synonomous with my love for Sierra, and computers have played a large part in my life since then. I had so many important experiences playing Sierra adventures growing up that I actually can’t remember my first Sierra experience! Ask any Sierra fan for a pivotal adventure experience, and you might want to get comfortable! One of the things that always stands out about Sierra’s games for me is that they were constantly innovating and they were always leading the industry – Space Quest III’s incredible soundtrack and King’s Quest V’s gorgeous VGA graphics come to mind. Pretty much all of Sierra’s games were meant to be experienced with your family and friends – I remember countless hours spent with my brother, puzzling our way through adventures together. I remember taking my Dad’s saved game disks and looking at his saved games, because he would play late at night when my brother and I were asleep, and he would get further than we would!

Quest for Glory was the one series I didn’t play more or less as they were being released, so one summer I played through the whole collection – 1 to 4 at the time – what an experience! Most fans had to wait years for the Hero’s story to unfold, and I enjoyed it one game after the other. I remember seeing the Space Quest comic books advertised in InterAction – I HAD to have those comics! I think it was some ridiculous mail order thing that I convinced my parents to go through for me, and it took the comics forever to arrive! I remember playing Police Quest endlessly! I took hundreds of screenshots because I wanted to make a comic book version of the game using screenshots in Dr. Halo, a paint program we had at the time.

CL: Now for some nerd love: I can’t wait for the book to be released! Can you give us any other exclusive details about the book?

BK: We can’t wait for the book to be released either. We have two editions of the book planned – both will be deluxe hardcover printings, but one will be a special commemorative edition that will include collectible lithographs by some of your favourite Sierra and adventure game artists. We actually can’t say too much about the release or the artwork just yet, and we still have surprises to come. You’ll definitely want to follow us on Facebook and register on ArtOfSierra.com to stay up to date with everything. We have lots of stuff coming that you won’t want to miss, including more details on the book, previews, giveaways and more.

Thanks Brandon for taking the time to share with us your joy and passion for this project.

“In this photo, we see some of the most well-known, Saturday morning cartoon styled screenshots from Willy Beamish. Dynamix Art Director Shawn Sharp was responsible for the rich and vibrant world of Willy Beamish, and he contributed a lot of art to the project – you can see here a glimpse of one of Shawn’s original background sketches. Willy Beamish fans are in for some real surprises with The Art of Sierra!”

“Shown here is an original concept sketch of a Barrow Wraith from Quest for Glory 4, drawn by Sierra Art Director Marc Hudgins. When an artist puts so much care into just a concept piece that it’s worthy of framing, you can tell that they were truly inspired!”

Eriq Chang and Brandon Klassen are the creative minds behind Fable Foundry Publishing, an independent studio founded in 2009.

Earlier this year, I worked up the cojones to send a quick e-mail to writer and photographer Christy Marx. As I reviewed her long list of writing achievements, especially in television shows such as Jem and the Holograms, G.I. Joe, Bucky O’Hare and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, I was reminded of the importance of saturday morning rituals in which nothing mattered more than sitting down with 2-3 bowls of hypersugary breakfast cereals and sitting 5 feet away from the TV when we could get away with it. At that time, for an awkward 13-year-old boy me, writers like Christy were just mysterious names in the credits whose job it was to keep me entertained between 8am and 4pm once a week.

But I did know her name, and her face, from another place. Christy Marx was that magical person featured on the back of two Sierra adventure game boxes. She designed, wrote and directed Conquests of Camelot (1989) and Conquests of the Longbow (1992).

In the 1990s, the bulk of adventure games followed a fairly common pattern: the hero set off on a quest to (retrieve/save/destroy) an (object/princess/enemy) that usually only the hero cared about. The story, if there was one, usually involved a series of loosely linked scenes that were supposed to add up to a plot. Puzzles were erected like roadblocks, meant to prevent you from finishing the game in less than 5 hours. I enjoyed those games – but later, as an adult with limited time and complex expectations, I now find many of those adventures hard to enjoy.

But Camelot and Longbow offered a different kind of experience. They were the first games I played where the puzzles weren’t culled from a 101 Brain Teasers book, and the NPCs were not item-droppers clothed in a “get me X and I’ll give you Y” interaction. Both Camelot and Longbow had stories and characters that mattered to me (and not just the protagonist) - it was the first time that I cared about the protagonist’s quest and wanted to help him through to the end. It was the first time I worked through a puzzle that was sculpted from the gameworld, rather than one clumsily shoehorned into a pre-existing story. The NPCs had lives of their own, some helping and some hindering my quest, but in all cases appeared to be people who hinted at a background replete with their own responsibilities, goals, friendships, grudges and stories. I played – and finished – both games twice this year and found myself thinking about their worlds and characters months later.

So when I had the chance to ask Christy Marx a few questions about her experiences writing and designing these games, I wanted my questions to count. I wanted to express how different her games were for me as a player. I wanted to ask her (okay – impress her with) what I thought were tough questions that only an articulate designer and writer could answer. In short, I choked.

Thankfully, that did not stop her from drawing thoughtful answers to my – paragraph long, kludgy – questions. In our conversation, Christy Marx articulates her thoughts on writing multi-dimensional characters, games as (a serious) art, storytelling, some of her literary influences behind Camelot and Longbow, and her desire to work on another adventure game (!)

(Minor spoiler warning: if you haven’t played Camelot or Longbow yet and plan to in the immediate future, and you are one of those types that becomes infuriated when someone else talks about the plot or characters of their favourite movie before you’ve seen it, you might want to stop here.)

CL: Your characters, from Jem to Robin Hood to King Arthur – all seem to focus on “inner strength” than outer strength or superhero-like powers. Why do these kinds of characters appeal to you as an author?

CM: Because those are the best kind of characters to write about: characters with depth, direction, purpose, passion and so on. Why would anyone want to write about, read about or watch a character with no dimensions, with nothing to make them interesting or worthwhile? Even an anti-hero character must have some piece of “hero” in there somewhere to make them work.

I think it’s more about making any character interesting by giving them a mix of strong and weak qualities. Where you find poorly done, cardboard cut-outs for characters is where they are presented as having no dimensions. They are simply one thing. That one thing can be heroic or evil, but if they have no other dimensions to them, they are flat. Even the worst people in history has reasons for the things they did, be they justifications or a genuine belief they were doing the right thing for their people, their country, their religion, or if very selfish (say a Henry the VIIIth) for themselves.

I think of people and therefore my characters as being a mix of many different types of qualities, being stronger in some qualities, weaker in others. And these things aren’t static either. If we examine ourselves closely, we’ll find moments when we behave one way and moments when we behave an opposite way, depending on the circumstances or who we’re dealing with.

Each one of us could probably think of one cause to which we’d donate our time and energy, and other causes we’d refuse to touch; or one person we’d go out of our way to help, but other people we’d avoid like the plague. So in one circumstance, we’re generous and helpful and giving, but change the circumstances and suddenly we’re stingy and cold and rejecting. We haven’t necessarily changed as a person, but our core beliefs drive our behaviors.

So when it comes to creating a compelling character, it’s more effective to have those dimensions in mind and let them play out in the character’s actions. A strong character with an inherent weakness is always going to be more interesting. It’s relatively easy to set up physical conflicts, but even more effective to add internal conflicts along with it.

It’s harder to accomplish this in games because you also give up much of the control to the player, as it should be, but you can still present them with ethical or moral choices and let them play out those choices and deal with the consequences.

CL: If you reflect on the last 20 years of children’s television shows (and video games), what kinds of values [if any] do you see expressed in the current crop of mainstream entertainment (films, cartoons, comics, games, etc)?

CM: I see the usual range of values that I’ve seen all along, though there does seem to be a trend toward having to be “dark” or “gritty” in order to be cool, and a higher level of cynicism. While I don’t disagree with being cynical to some degree, it needs to be counterbalanced with positive words and actions. Being cynical solely for the sake of being cool is a losing proposition.

CL: Did you have a specific audience in mind when you wrote the stories for Conquests of Camelot and/or Conquests of the Longbow?

CM: Mainly I wanted to satisfy the people who liked to play Sierra games. I didn’t stop to evaluate who they were, really.

CL: Both Camelot and Longbow are, to my knowledge, the only games in the world that include extensive bibliographies in their manuals. Why was researching the historical and fictional literature so important to you in the process of crafting the story?

CM: I couldn’t imagine trying to create adventure games around legendary characters like those without doing massive research. So many of my best ideas came from doing the research. I’d come across some fascinating tidbit that would spin me off in unexpected directions or spark new ideas. Everyone has heard of “Nottingham”, but what was it really like? I contacted a historical museum in Nottingham and learned about the ancient pub and the secret tunnels and all sorts of wonderful things that went into the game.

Also, there’s what the game seems to be about on the surface and what the game is really about — the theme of the game. As a writer, I want my games imbued with a theme in order to have the depth needed for good storytelling. Research is a vital part of achieving that. And if I was going to do all that research, I might as well share the sources. It only made sense to me.

CL: In the beginning of Conquests of Camelot, I have to admit that I greedily reached into the treasure box in Arthur’s castle to get a few more handfuls of coins than I needed. The parser responds, “Nay leave it be. Your mission must be kept humble, for safety as well as your soul’s sake.” I was struck by the moral tone – that greed/selfishness was antithetical to Arthur’s quest. Later, the game reminds the player that the quest concerns, “Not only finding the Grail, but your worthiness of possessing it.” Even later, Arthur is tempted by sexual pleasure and the easy life … “delights of the flesh” (sweetest fruits and meats) by kissing Fatima. Spirituality and morality seem to be central to the way Arthur’s story is told. Compare that to today’s games in which greed, hoarding, and the accrual of power are prized aspects of the game’s design. Can you tell us a bit about the role spirituality and morality play in the way you wanted to tell the Arthurian legends?

CM: How can you tell the story of Arthur any other way?  The entire Arthurian Cycle as it has developed over the centuries, and especially when it incorporated the Grail mythology, is about morality, trust, faith, love, betrayal and redemption. Those are the vital elements that underpin the stories as we know them today. Yes, you could set out to do a purely historical Arthur (and there have been plenty of attempts to do so) and simply have him be a Romanized Celtic-British cavalry warchief who overcomes various enemies. But that isn’t as much fun as playing with the mythological elements, especially for a game. I feel that the reason the Arthurian legends have such staying power is due to the powerful themes that are woven throughout them. As writer, I never thought twice about the idea of giving the player moral choices. That’s what Arthur’s story is about.

CL: In an interview in Sierra’s “InterAction Magazine”, you mention how you and Peter Ledger worked together as a creative duo, bouncing ideas off one another during the creative process. Did you collaborate on any artistic/creative projects prior to Camelot, or was this your first opportunity? If this is not too personal, what do you miss the most about working with him?

CM: Yes, we’d been working together on comics for many years before that. He did the art for The Sisterhood of Steel graphic novel. We did a three-part story called Carlos McLlyr the Californio, a supernatural historic adventure set in 1840’s Los Angeles, and a number of other stories here and there.

Unfortunately, Peter hated working on computers with a passion, so he wanted nothing more to do with them after Conquests of Camelot. He was an artist who needed the tactile process of working with ink, paper and paint.

CL: I noticed that in both Camelot and Longbow there seems to be an implied tension between the emergence of Christianity and the demise of pre-Christian (Paganist, Anamist, Pantheist) religions. Old-world religion is expressed in the old gods (Mithras) who is “driven away” at the end of the game by the power of Christ and the grail; Marian as a priestess of the old powers of the forest/mother nature in Longbow. As far as I can tell, these were more or less part of the “background” or mythology of both games, yet played a powerful role in how your characters were written. (If I’m not talking out my ass here..) Why is this tension important to the way you tell both stories?

CM: I will admit that I was heavily influenced by the writing of Mary Stewart and her utterly brilliant trilogy about Merlin (The Crystal Cave, The Hollow Hills and The Last Enchantment). The passing of the old pagan gods and the rise of the Christian god is one of the main themes running through those books.

Unlike Mary Stewart, I’m on the side of the pagan gods. LOL!  I don’t subscribe to the Christian faith and don’t mind tweaking its nose, so to speak.

CL: In Longbow, Robin Hood seems to walk a fine line between brigandry and morality. He robs a jeweller for instance, and is *more* apt to rob him because the jeweller insults his manhood and treats him as a common thief. But instead of robbing the jeweller for his money, he takes the jeweller’s cape instead and “more than repays” the man for the cape. This does not seem to be the same kind of clear-cut morality as Arthur has in Camelot. As a reader/player, does one character appeal to you over the other? What about as a storyteller?

CM: They’re two entirely different types of characters. King Arthur represented nobility, courage, valor and similar values while Robin Hood represented being an outlaw, living by one’s wits, and justice in an unjust time. It wouldn’t make sense to write the same kind of game about two such different characters. In the Camelot game, the moral choices were clear-cut. In Longbow, Robin Hood is a trickster-hero, so I wanted more shades of gray in the choices. By the second game, I had a better sense of how to accomplish that, as well.

With Longbow, I gave the player a number of options for dealing with each person they encountered and hinted at the best choice. But ultimately, the player gets to decide how they want to behave.

Personally, I have a bit more fun writing a trickster-hero like Robin Hood than a more straightforward hero like Arthur.

CL: Camelot ends with Arthur sadly watching the love relationship between Lancelot and Gwenhyver (“But though your land is healed, your heart is not. Perhaps it never shall be.”), while Robin Hood ends in a happy-go-lucky marriage. The former, to me, is a pretty emotionally ambivalent (almost tragic) ending for the protagonist, while the latter ends in comedy. As a reader/player, do you prefer one ending over the other?

CM: One is based on a romantic tragedy and one is based on ballads about cunning and sly humor. The source material dictates the direction, though you can have Longbow end somewhat tragically with Marian dead. I don’t have a strong preference for one over the other. I just want a gripping story that is well told.

CL: In a post on your blog you mention three guidelines for an artistic understanding of video games: a significant/substantive subject matter, attention to writing, acting, and visual presentation, and the maker’s reputation as an artist or outsider-to-art. Given that video games, cartoons and comics are thought of by the public as “mere entertainment”, do you see “art” as an important part of the way you tell your stories? Or did “entertainment” mean something different for you from the beginning?

CM: Those weren’t guidelines for videogames. I was trying to work out what it was that seemed to elevate a movie from being “mere entertainment” to being considered an arthouse film or to have a higher level of artistic quality. Let me go over them again (and revise them slightly):

Guideline #1: the movie needs to be about something significant or of substance that has an impact on the viewer.

Guideline #2: the quality of the audiovisual components, acting, writing, etc. needs to be unique or of special quality (not mundane or commercially ordinary).

Guideline #3: the intent of the film’s primary “creator” (usually the director) is known to be about something other than commercial success or making money.

I used Spielberg as an example. He was lauded when he made big, blockbuster movies that were huge successes.  He was initially lambasted mercilessly when he madeThe Color Purple because people didn’t accept him as a maker of a serious or artistic film. I think it took Schindler’s List for him to finally gain that acceptance.

Then I wondered whether those guidelines could be applied to games. Or to comics, for that matter. I personally feel they can be applied. In comics, for example, look at how differently Maus was treated from other comics. Maybe it only takes two out of three in order to qualify. Maus fulfilled #1 and #2. The art was okay, but nothing special, however the subject matter and the creator’s background was enough to give it the “art” cachet. And possibly to the mainstream the use of anthropomorphized animals was unique (though not to those of us who know the medium well).

There are people making what are called “serious” games, meaning their primary role isn’t to entertain, but to use elements of entertainment in order to teach or train in a real world setting or for a real world purpose. And yet I haven’t heard one of those games being referred to as art, so what’s missing?

This is getting long, so I’ll leave it up to others to decide on the validity of these ideas and explore how they might or might not be applied. It’s something I’m still in the process of thinking about myself.

For me personally, I just love to tell stories. I’m a born storyteller, that’s what I love. I like my stories to have some substance and not be fluff. I strive for quality. But I’m also a professional, and when I’m being paid to produce a piece of commercial work, I deliver what is asked of me with the highest quality I can manage within the parameters of the job.

After all, creative people have to pay the bills, too. Some of the most famous art in history was done on commission. Michelangelo didn’t want to paint the ceiling of the Apostolic Palace, but the Pope made him and what we got out of it is the Sistine Chapel.

CL: Do you have a particular audience that you personally prefer to write for (in any medium)? Has that changed over the years?

CM: No, I don’t. The majority of my work has been for the eight to twelve year old demographic and I enjoy that a lot, but I’m happy to write for any age group or type. I write the stories that I enjoy telling and that seems to work great.

CL: Today, would you ever want to work again as the creative lead/chief writer/designer/head honcho/ on a unique game with a small team, as you did in the 80s and 90s with Peter Ledger and the Sierra On-Line team? In other words: is there a particular story that you’ve always wanted to tell in the form of a game?

CM: I can’t tell you how much I would love to be designing these kinds of adventure games again. I believe a small, tight, well-knit team is better than throwing tons of people at something. I’d love to continue the Conquest series and have Charlemagne in the back of my head as a candidate, though I’d like to use a strong woman of history to build a game around, too.

But I would also love to set a story in 1920’s Hollywood during the silent movies. I adore that time period. I have an anachronistic crush on Rudy Valentino.

Thanks Christy, for taking the time to answering some questions that I’ve had running around in my head for years, as well as ones that I had not even thought of. And while I’m here: Are you there, Mithras? It’s me, Chris. Please set up Christy Marx with a game design studio so she can send us on some wonderful adventures again.

• An evolving thriller in which you shape the story
• Mature content, reflecting a realistic world setting that explores powerful themes
• Stunning graphics, animation and technology support an emotionally driven experience
• Accessible gameplay via intuitive, contextual controls and interface

In this article I don’t want to harp on David Cage or Quantic Dream. The kinds of goals he has for his games are right up my alley, and if the games fails to satisfy those goals, it would be rather asinine of me to point fingers at him or his studio. Instead, I’d like to think about what we mean by an “interactive narrative” and why we are being led further and further away from a truly interactive storytelling experience, especially in games that attempt to simulate one. So let me be clear: this isn’t a review or a critique of Heavy Rain, but of the general kind of problems we face today in making interactive stories.

As a foil to Heavy Rain, I take a very simple and effective “edutainment” title from my back-catalogue of 1990s edutainment titles, and show that Stephen Biesty’s Incredible Cross-Sections: Stowaway! (whew) manages to produce a far more immersive and interactive narrative experience using a gameplay approach that is simpler and totally straightforward. (And I’ll make it spoiler-free if that matters for you, I hope.)

The Response to Heavy Rain So Far

Michael Abbott’s initial response to Heavy Rain captured almost every aspect of the game that made me cringe: dramatic tension fails to build, it confuses game-directed “input prompts” with player agency, marionetting the protagonist ultimately destroys one’s affective connection to him, and an inconsistent/arbitrary control system that serves only to breed learned helplessness and frustration.

I think Michael puts it best when he writes, “The game is at odds with itself from beginning to end. It persistently reminds me that neither I nor my avatar possess consequential autonomy. In Heavy Rain, the game itself controls the game, and that doesn’t feel much like interactive drama to me.” (my emphasis)

The Problem

The question of “realism” in games is something we’ve been contending with for years. A couple of years ago the discussion was all about photorealism in Mass Effect and the new Star Wars films, and if it adds any value to a narrative or is just downright creepy and distracting (note: I snobbily avoid using the “uncanny” valley nonsense, just because most of the people who use that term have never read or understood Freud – and Heidegger’s – powerful notion of ‘the uncanny’). I argued that photorealistic games fail to “grab” us precisely because they try to systematically represent a character’s face or bodily movements… and no amount of technological advancement will yield a believable computer-generated character. Instead, I motioned for a return to the heavy artistic stylization of characters by artists like Jim Hensen, who made “Kermit the Frog” and “Oscar the Grouch” far more believable than a digitized Jabba the Hutt.

In Heavy Rain we’re facing the same problem. Although few people have pointed it out (as most of us are now desensitized to photorealism), the visual metaphor for the game is the same as all other 3D FPS games today: attempt to represent human physiognomy and movement as “realistically” as possible using highly technological means. Because David Cage wants us to believe that we’re directing a film with “live” actors, the characters appear to move like people, appear to frown like people, and appear to cry like people.

Appear to. Ay, there’s the rub. The attempt to make each character appear real is at odds with the complex storytelling goals of the game. When a game attempts to “simulate” rather than “express” an experience, it loses its ability to artistically exaggerate or highlight some aspects of the experience over others. Let me clear that up with an example…

If I’m trying to tell you a story about something that happened in my psychology class last week (ie. a student who disrupted a lecture by talking loudly), I should only relate details about the situation that are relevant to expressing the kind of experience it was. Maybe I was already having a bad day before I got to class – I stubbed my toe on my way to the bathroom, and one of the cats shit in my shoes, and during the lecture I kept tripping over words. All of a sudden it becomes believable that I lost my temper with a student who was talking in class, and royally embarrassed both of us.

But what if I started the story by introducing extraneous (yet true and representative!) details about the color and cut of the pants I was wearing, the way I did my hair that morning, and the temperature of the classroom that day, you’ll likely say to me: Yeah, yeah, I get it! – but what does that have to do with the story? In other words, you can’t simulate an experience – you can only express one through a story.

That’s what games like Heavy Rain end up getting tripped up with. All of the extraneous details of the scene – the perfectly rendered eyelashes, the flaring irises, the reflection of tears on cheeks – all become the focus of every scene and distract the player from understanding the aspects of the story that really matter.

Not only that – but Heavy Rain tries to go one step further – it does not only want realistic visuals, but realistic kinesthetics. Instead of having the player direct the character at emotionally important moments crucial to the development of the story, the player is required to puppeteer every banal minutiae of everyday life, from pulling out a wallet to checking a watch. None of these micro-actions express anything important about the character’s personality or her/his plight. As a result, I cannot distinguish between what’s important and what’s window-dressing.

The total experience, for me (and perhaps others?) is a game that resists itself at every turn: it wants me to participate in the unfolding of a story, only by forcing upon me irrelevant details and banalities that do little to express a coherent vision of a world. Heavy Rain is something like a schizophrenic-neurotic mom – she wants me to tell all my friends her jumbled paranoid fantasies. She hovers over me the whole time, and when I get some seemingly meaningless detail wrong she threatens to strangle me. Love you too, mom.

The Solution?

I had originally intended to write a love story to the numerous edutainment titles of the 1990s that simultaneously bored and impressed my 13 year old mind. Instead, I realized that many educational games succeeded at the one thing that Heavy Rain does not: letting me help direct the action on the screen, as if I’m a participant in the story.

Most games today only concern themselves with entertaining or immersing the player in a fantasy world, and that’s a difficult enough job. But think about the tremendously difficult task the average edutainment title has – it has to both entertain and educate five to ten year old kids about some infinitely boring subject that only adults care about. Like 19th-Century Man’o'War ships, for instance!

Stephen Biesty’s Incredible Cross-Sections: Stowaway! takes Biesty’s incredibly well-illustrated book and turn it into an interactive experience. The ship is cut into cross-sections that can be navigated using an UP/DOWN/FORE/AFT control scheme. Each cross-section has meticulously detailed illustrations that draw my eye toward the “story” being told in each pane; if I click on hotspots in the scene a little narrative plays out. It’s as close as a game has ever come to an interactive pop-up book. Like Heavy Rain, you’re on the hunt for someone – instead of a psycho killer, you’re looking for a grungy little stowaway that is hiding in several places on the ship.

The difference in the control mechanism between Heavy Rain and Stowaway is night and day. Where the former tries to simulate motion by forcing the player into complex marionetting, the latter takes a traditional up-down-left-right scheme and works wonders.

In Stowaway!, I get the sense that when I click “down”, I really am moving up to a lower section of the ship, even though I am not visually shown the transition between decks. How can a game that does not physically show me moving throughout the ship give me a sense of movement? Stephen Biesty accomplishes a feat of artistic consistency that any comic book artist could hope for: when I’m standing on the orlop deck watching the deckmates go about their business, I look at the mast and think, “Hey, that mast goes way down into the ship!” My imagination makes the transition between each deck of the ship for me; Biesty completes the image by showing me the next section of the mast, just as my imagination hoped. Stowaway! gives me a sense of agency by allowing me to help imagine parts of the scene for myself. Sure, there are plenty of illustrated details on each deck, but none of those details are extraneous to the kind of story being told about the brutality of an 18th century English Man-of-War.

Biesty accomplishes this by exaggerating all the right things: all of his characters and scenes are carefully illustrated to express a sense of humor and the deep gravity of war. The surgeon’s assistant carelessly tosses a limb into a bloody bucket, and I simultaneously cringe and laugh at the sillyness/seriousness of amputation. The surgeon’s amputation feels more real to me than any murder scene in Heavy Rain, because Stowaway! boils the experience down to its essential elements.

Imagining Makes it Real

That’s all to say – Stowaway succeeds where Heavy Rain fails because it makes some space for the player’s imagination to complete the experience. Representational realism – whether it is an attempt at puppeteering the character through the controls, or an attempt at photorealism – cannot itself make a game worth playing or a story worth following. What we experience as real in a game has much more to do with the aesthetic exaggerations the developer makes in order to give a scene a certain flavor. The Uncharted series is a perfect example of how talented voice acting can turn a boring and hackneyed character into a lovable rogue. Without stylization that highlights certain features of the character/scene over others, and allows the player to complete the rest of the image, your game will be profoundly tedious at best – and totally unbelievable at worst.

“We should find ourselves indulging in similar daydreams if we started musing under the cone-shaped roof of a wind-mill. We should sense its terrestrial nature, and imagine it to be a primitive hut stuck together with mud, firmly set on the ground in order to resist the wind. Then, in an immense synthesis, we should dream at the same time of a winged house that whines at the slightest breeze and refines the energies of the wind. Millers, who are the wind thieves, make good flour from storms.” – Gason Bachelard, The Poetics of Space.

At the 2009 GDC, I had the opportunity to sit down with Jenova Chen, a designer and developer who needs no introduction. Over 10 months later, Jamie Love of GameSugar.net persuaded me to publish the interview in the form of a podcast. Many hours of editing later (thanks Jamie!) the first part of a two-part interview is now available online.

You can listen to the interview in a flash player here, or download the mp3 directly. (Warning to the bandwidth-challenged: the file is 75mb)

I hope you enjoy listening to Jenova’s thoughts on the relation between art and games – it’s a rare opportunity to sit down with such a generous and articulate soul. Part 2 of the interview is forthcoming, and like this one will be posted on GameSugar.net.

I’m nearing the end of Fallout 3, and my wasteland ranger who has spent most of his adult life trying to free the wastes from oppression and slavery, is loaded with every kind of ammunition and ranged weaponry imaginable. Despite his meek and non-aggressive social demeanour, there is nothing humble about someone who’s packin’ a Fat Boy – a shoulder-launched nuke weapon – around all day.

While both of these games always offer a “high road” approach to moral choices in conversation as we would expect in a contemporary RPG, the games still rely upon a highly individualistic and egocentric play structure. In this article I try to understand how games supposedly devoted to allowing moral choices, in fact offer highly hypocritical experiences for the do-gooder player. (Spoiler-alert for Planescape: Torment and Ultima IV near the bottom of the article.)

The Hero Archetype and the Spiritual Quest

Within many cultural and religious traditions, acts of poverty and self-defacement are seen among the highest forms of piety possible. Vows of poverty, for instance, were a requirement in order to join the righteous Knights Templar (aka. “The Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon”). Around the same time, it was not uncommon for Anorexia mirabilis (“miraculous lack of appetite”) among pious women, who later experienced spiritual enlightenment… a famous case being Catherine of Siena, “who purportedly ate nothing but a spoonful of herbs a day, aside from the Eucharist” . Among the Crow aboriginal people of Montana, cutting off a piece of one’s finger and severe fasting were ways of inducing sacred visions. Even for us living in modernity, the whole idea of a spiritual and moral quest somehow involves “giving up oneself” or one’s treasured things in favour of some kind of insight into oneself. In each of these examples there is the sense that one makes self-sacrifice in order to fulfill something greater than oneself – it is an act of good, pure and simple.

Similarly, role-playing games are often premised on a hero whose quest is ordained in relation to some greater good. Mass Effect’s Commander Shepherd is a potential galactic saviour, Jack of BioShock wishes to escape his imprisonment and save the little sisters, the Avatar of Ultima VIII: Pagan wishes to return to his own world, Cloud of Final Fantasy VII is on the trail of his nemesis Sepiroth, the Fallout 3 protagonist begins with a search for her/his father, and Crono and the gang are on a quest to prevent the destruction of the world in Chrono Trigger. (In most of these games it is equally possible to refuse the higher calling, but I will confront this later.)

All of these games are premised in some kind of moral choice that the player must make.

In most of these games, I attempt to play a character that is capable of saving his (sometimes her) own butt in a pinch, but ultimately tries to live quietly and benevolently. In most cases, PC-NPC dialogues support a Ned Flanders type character through the traditional Good/Neutral/Evil response options, although sometimes requires a bit of tactfulness on my part to make things work out morally for the character. Threat of violence is a last resort.

Yet, despite my social niceties, in almost every one of these games, I can expect to be dozing on a bed of filthy lucre, armoured like a steel triceratops, and carrying an arsenal of weapons capable of total world annihilation a few times over, by the end of the game. It usually ends up in some final boss fight where I have to put all of my destructive

powers to the test in order to vanquish the Enemy (whether it is a character or a problem of some kind). Inevitably, my decked-out party overcomes the Enemy and happiness is granted to the universe once more. My character (and her/his party) is exalted into glory, and occasionally the hero(ine) wins over the love interest. I watch the ending cinematic, give a few Oscar nods to the friends and family who made it all possible, and call it a game.

Yet, days later, I feel like Conan the Barbarian, sitting on his throne at the end of the first film like a king who has done it all yet feels ultimately unfulfilled. This is when the spiritual hollowness of traditional RPGs grates at me.

The hero’s quest, which was originally a spiritual quest of the ilk I described earlier, has become literalized into a gradual accrual of power; in doing so the chances for spiritual development and transformation are almost completely squashed. Rather than going through a process of “giving up” oneself for a greater good, and later realizing that evil is always carried within oneself and not ‘out there in the world’ – as we see in traditional piety, the modern RPG hero/heroine does the opposite – s/he overcomes evil by destroying it. I still go through the rituals of self-sacrifice and a whole lot of blood’n'sweat’n'tears, but they are all motivated toward making myself a demi-god.

The Hypocritical/Moralistic Hero

In that light, traditional RPGs – not all of them mind you! – produce what I’d like to call the “hypocritical hero” or the “moralistic hero”. This is the hero that always gives out 10 gp to beggars on the street, knowing that s/he has 4500 gp resting comfortably in the larders. There is no real self-abasement this hero’s acts; it is temporary inconveniencing under a mask of generosity. Sort of like the guy who lambasts anyone who doesn’t drink Eco-Friendly coffee, and proceeds to drive his Hummer to work.

I should note: I have purposely neglected the “evil” hero in the prior thoughts because many RPGs already lend themselves to this kind of role-playing. I can simply choose the “bad guy” conversation options and live out my days as a greedy gunslinger with an attitude. The point is that the evil hero is fully supported by the game, because s/he is guaranteed to be rich and powerful by the end of the game. There is no hypocrisy possible for the evil hero; most RPGs already celebrate this kind of behaviour in the gameplay itself.

Notable Exceptions

Here be spoilers: At the same time, there are some major exceptions to my characterization of RPGs. The Nameless One of Planescape: Torment begins on an identity quest that is ultimately resolvable in a very different manner than the kind I noted earlier. While the evil and greedy incarnations of The Nameless One can be role-played throughout the game effectively, the “good” character can resolve his identity by embracing his symbolic shadow. He learns his true name in an act of humility and self-acceptance. The Nameless One can fulfill his spiritual quest without destroying or battling anyone as he realizes that he has always faced an inner (moral) battle. He makes no use of his accrued power, swords or sorcery, and instead relies upon the insight that he is the source of his own evils. In other words, the “good” ending is truly possible in Torment. Equally possible are the evil or instrumental endings, but those are premised against the possibility of being truly regretful of his past sins.

In another example, the protagonist (yourself) of Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar is sent on a spiritual quest, although this one is not particularly about you. It is about the meaning of things and the discovery of a moral reality that underlies all acts of good and evil in the world of Britannia. It is about saving a world gone to petty thievery and selfishness. Acknowledging the virtues (Honesty, Compassion, Valor, Justice, Honor, Sacrifice, Spirituality, Humility) involves the player discovering ways of practicing each of these virtues in the game itself. Like the Knights Templar, acts of sacrifice and compassion are a requirement for membership in this game. And like Planescape, the game is not resolved in an epic battle made possible by insane physical strength or mental powers, but by answering 8 questions that test your knowledge of the virtues themselves. One of the final phrases asks, “What, in knowing the true self, knows all?” To the modern gamer, ending an RPG with philosophical questions would be unimaginable. At the same time, an “evil” or selfish ending is not possible in this game – the game is only resolvable if you accept and fulfill the quest of being the Avatar (the embodiment) of the virtues.
/end spoilers.

Concluding Thoughts

What I’ve been trying to get at in this article is that despite our appreciation that games are meaningful, they often celebrate the worst aspects of our humanity (selfishness, the desire to dominate others) with the guise of moral righteousness. Worse, games like Arcanum, the Final Fantasy series, and Fallout 3 make it completely impossible to complete a game without needing to max out the protagonist’s attributes and inventory and in doing so celebrate adolescent power fantasies. The original spiritual quest, despite it being the entire point of the game as acknowledged by the story, is totally maligned by the underlying gameplay. If developers want to genuinely acknowledge our desire for meaning and self-transformation, they will have to develop a better sense for what is involved in a “moral choice”… it is certainly not a case of hoarding guns’n'ammo and picking the ethical alternative in a conversation.

The game takes place on the Orient Express, days before WW1 breaks out, and quickly embroils you into intrigue as you are implicated in the murder of your own best friend. The game has an elaborate branching narrative system in which all the characters have their own plots, their own desires, and often results in player experiences being radically different from one another. If you go to sleep early, or spend too much time exploring the sleeper cabins, there’s a good chance that you’ll miss a juicy conversation in the dining room. And what other game has a 15 minute violin and piano concerto, played from start to finish, that you can either attend or use it as an opportunity to scout out the cabins of your fellow passengers? What other game follows the romantic entanglement of two female passengers, allowing you to sneak a peek at one of their private diaries? Aside from Roberta William’s The Colonel’s Bequest, there is no other game that has this kind of living, breathing, world of layer upon layer of developing plots. And aside from the beauty of the narrative, the game has a wonderful Art Nouveau flair reminiscent of famed artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, as well as rotoscoped animation that gives Eric Chahi a run for his money.

For nearly a decade, little was written about the game and only recently a few very good articles recognized that the game has a charm and sense of poetic (perhaps magical?) realism that has went unmatched since its release.

Tom Cross’s article, All Aboard The Last (Narrative) Express reflects upon how the kinds of narrative and visual styles the game relies upon opens up an emotionally realistic space within the constrained physical quarters of the Orient Express. In it, Cross makes the argument that poetic realism (I’m paraphrasing him freely here) creates a truly believable and intimate world, whereas the geometric or representational realism we find in 95% of modern games truly fails to. It suitably whets the gaming appetite of someone who has never played the game, yet desires to.

Chris Remo’s article, The Last Express: Revisiting an Unsung Classic, consists of a lengthy interview with two of the gamer’s developers and provides a sense of the technical (and motivational!) feats involved in creating a truly unique adventure game. The article makes good background reading for someone who has already played through it a couple of times, and gave me a real sense for how a game could become a critical success yet fail financially.

If I’ve piqued your interest at all, you have quite a few options for playing it. Thankfully, the game runs just fine in Windows XP and Vista. GameTap subscribers have had access to it for years, but it is not available on GOG.com yet unfortunately. (Please Jordan, release it on GoG.com.. the folks there really do care about the classics!) If you’d like a physical copy, there are a few reasonable auctions on eBay, including a very nice boxed (complete) version. The game runs on Mac in “Classic” (OS9) mode, but not in OS X – so I’d suggest either booting to XP with boot camp, or playing the game in Dosbox.

I’d love to play through this game again, so if there is any interest in starting an ongoing play-through by e-mail, let’s get a discussion going!

Last night I was sitting with a friend of mine talking about our experiences playing games as kids. We were surprised to learn that we had both owned the cult classic (yet poorly marketed) ToeJam & Earl for the Sega Genesis/Mega-Drive in the 1990′s and brought back some fond memories for each of us.

Its re-appearance on the Wii Virtual Console was a welcome gesture, but I was disappointed with reviewer responses who felt that characters move “lethargically slow”, the gameplay was “unfair”, the funky visual style too “dated” to be enjoyable, and that its 16-bit synth music was too crippled for contemporary gamers. At the same time, most of these reviewers begrudgingly admit that it’s likely a “classic” and enjoys some nostalgic street cred, especially for its two player co-op mode.

After reading those reviews, I realized that ToeJam & Earl - a cult staple of the average SEGA generation child’s household -- has become just another brief glint in the endless library of emulated games available for casual play. This is where I want to part ways with the average reviewer out there, and try to show why ToeJam & Earl is still an important game today, and offers something wonderful to the kind of curious, exploration-driven, non-competitive, fun-loving, and non-violent child (or adult!) gamer that we talked about previously. It’s a game that you should be playing with your partner, your child, or a close friend, right now. Nostalgia for its own sake is a very real, and I think very dangerous, part of reflecting on older video games. I think that re-vitalizing them and finding value in them for a new generation is a noble, and difficult task. I’ll do my best.

It’s important to understand that TJ&E is thoroughly nonsensical and excels at it. It’s a game about a three-legged red alien reminiscent of Flavor Flav and his slug-shaped hot-dog eating alien buddy from the planet Funkotron, who crash their boom-box/surfboard equipped space ship on Earth. The introduction sets the players on a quest for retrieving the 10 parts of their funkay spacecraft that are strewn over tens of randomly generated levels. I won’t comment on the single-player mode, as the game was originally offered as a “two-player game with a single player option”. In the two-player co-op mode, one person walks TJ around while the other has Earl. TJ walks faster than Earl, but Earl has a larger health bar. Inevitably there is a fight over who gets to be TJ, as he can run away from most enemies. My friend and I both shamefully admitted that we always forced our younger sisters to play Earl.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=vloYvK2sK1g

A Brief Tour of the Game

TJ and Earl both amble around the level and search for parts of the space ship while avoiding all sorts of bizarre enemies: “insane dentists, hula girls, obese stay-at-home mothers, and phantom ice cream trucks”. Dropped randomly on each level are presents filled with all sorts of items: super hi-top sneakers that give you a speed bonus, rocket skates that send you flying off at breakneck speed, a telephone that reveals hidden areas of the level’s overhead map, springy shoes that allow you to jump across crevices, or a dummy that draws enemies towards it. Whenever one present is opened, both players receive the same the benefit (or punishment). Familiar to most Mario Kart 64 players, some presents with a question mark just ain’t safe to open. Randomly found throughout the game are helper (and hinderer) characters such as Santa Claus (who will drop a bunch of presents if you sneak up on him), Carrot Wise Man who can identify your mystery presents for a few bucks, the Viking opera singer who destroys all enemies on the screen with her awful singing, or the stampeding pack’o'nerds that will flatten you if you get in their way. Every imaginable hyperbole of American 90′s life is packed into the game.

TJ&E’s Unique, Funky, Style

Pulling all of these elements together is the famously funky soundtrack and visual style. Visually, the game reminds me a bit of the style of animation used in the cartoon Dr. Katz, called “squiggle-vision” meets the colourful personality of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Straight lines and fonts and backgrounds all move around randomly and suggest to the players that gaming is about having fun! Similarly, the excellent bass guitar-driven funky beats lend your efforts at exploration a rhythm that I’ve rarely seen elsewhere… every track encourages you to bob your head along as your fingers do the hard work. This seems like a trite thing, but with the wild visual style and bright colours, the music definitely adds something unspeakably fantastic to the gameplay.

But those things, while goofy and entertaining in themselves, are not what makes the game great.

A Perfect Expression of Co-Operative Play

Jason Moses writes,

What makes TJ&E a great game is its cooperative mode. Playing with someone else opens up a lot of avenues for interaction that aren’t present when playing alone. Pooling information on presents together, arguing about the best route to the exit in a given stage, yelling obscenities when one player gets sucked into a tornado and dropped to a lower level.

Better than that, even, is that playing with someone else allows you to give the other player a high five (in the game, natch) in order to equalize both players’ lifebars. If Earl gets pretty beat up, all it takes to get him back up to speed is a high five. Best play mechanic ever? It’s up there.

In my experience, the 2-player co-op mode also invites (our admittedly adolescent minds) to all kinds of pranks. Threatening to cast a shower of tomatoes on the world (especially when your partner was in lifebar distress), or using the rocket skates present when they were near the edge of the screen, both guaranteed a scuffle at the controllers. At the same time, helping one another explore the world and uncover the fog of war on the map, or putting enemies to sleep by opening a boom-box gift, require a team effort.

And if actually collecting the spaceship parts is one of your goals, then cooperation is a must because the game can be a little unforgiving at times. If you fall off the edge of the map, you land on a lower level of the game. TJ can comfortably navigate level 4, even after Earl has fallen down to level 3. In order to get to level 5, Earl has to make his way back up to level 4, and both have to walk into the elevator. You can imagine how irritating this gets when someone opens up a rocket skates present and you go flying off the edge of the world.

Beyond the narrative’s stated goals however, I think the real value in the game is exploration and creative playfulness pure and simple. Finding each of the ship’s parts is simply an excuse to get into the elevator and hop onto another level where you might have a random encounter with Santa or something new that you haven’t seen yet. There’s even a “Jam Out” mode (separate from level exploration) that disables the drum track so you can play your own beats to the music, while TJ and Earl bust a move. The win in this game, if there is one, is in new encounters and the pure enjoyment of opening up mysterious gifts.

If gamers today believe that they have lost interest in the unforgiving cruelty of 1990′s platformers like Wonder Boy, or the barely-entertaining insane difficulty of the Mega Man series, then ToeJam & Earl should be the exact kind of game that caters to their desire for non-violent exploration and co-operation for its own sake. If you’ve played this game with a friend or partner or child, or have memories of playing it, I’d love to hear your about your experiences.

Note: My thanks to Mobygames for supplying the screenshots.

When we think of computer and video games, the word “space” is almost automagically translated into “coordinate space” or Cartesian space. After all, almost all games since the late 70′s used some kind of X/Y coordinate system to plot pixels on a screen; in the 90′s that became X/Y/Z space as 3D games took off. This is a technological understanding of space -- it envisions space as a kind of empty vacuum in which objects can be arranged in a consistent way -- and we perceive those objects according to some kind of spatial formula (ie. 2D or 3D coordinates).

I want to affirm a very different understanding of “spatial” than what most gamers and writers think it means. Space, as we experience it playing games, is not a Cartesian coordinate system for representing objects, characters, narrative, or sound… I believe that there is a much deeper understanding of space in video games that we implicitly live as we play them. And I’ll try doing articulating this different theory of space without any kind of techno-jargon — just a bunch of examples from a game that expresses the kind of space I’m talking about. My point is going to be that gamers experience space in a totally different way than mathematicians like Descartes did or programmers do.

Space is created the second a player sits down and begins playing a game. Most of the time we think of this as an dialogical “interactive space” -- the player issues commands to the computer, and the game responds in some way, which the player responds to, ad infinitum. When we think of interaction in this way, we think of the player and game in some kind of unfolding dialogue with one another. But I’m not convinced that players really dialogue with games or computers. I see the player doing something different when they act in an interactive space. Let’s take the prologue to The Curse of Monkey Island as an example of an expressive interactive space.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IBUfXq0nbk

At the beginning of the game (ffwd to 7:40), Guybrush Threepwood is held captive inside of the hold of LeChuck’s ship; he stands up and exclaims (in the voice of a Shakespearean aside), “I’ve got to get out of here and help Elaine! If I could only get through this one door…”

Here’s where the interactive space begins to unfold. As a first-time player I explore the scene with my hand -- I move the cursor around and click on a few items around Guybrush. A long pole hangs on the wall opposite me -- literally opposite me as a player and for Guybrush too -- so I instinctively reach towards it. Guybrush dramatically drops it into his pants, somehow defying physical reality. I realize -- this game is not just about solving problems or fulfilling quests or hearing a story -- it’s also about finding silliness and humour in the profane. Greedily, I reach for the cannon balls. Guybrush gripes, “Mmmh… they’re too heavy to carry.” I gesture toward the hole beside the cannon, Guybrush partly squeezes himself through the gunport and gets stuck. I motion him back to the hold. Curious at what is in the next room, I gesture toward the door. Guybrush peers into the keyhole of the door, ”I see a diorama of the children of the world living in peace and freedom! …… No wait -- it can’t be that -- it’s just too dark to make out what’s in there.”

As I play with the different items and places in this first scene, a space of possibilities begins to cohere for me. Guybrush is a weakling, so brute force ain’t going to work. Convincing “Bloodnose the Pirate” (aka. Wally) to open the door is not a straightforward request -- it requires neither threats nor persuasion -- but incessant adolescent goading of Wally’s piratehood. If I use the cutlass on Wally, Guybrush grimaces, “I don’t wanna disembowel poor Wally!” This is not the same kind of interactive space as, say, TES: Oblivion which all but encourages the player to slice and dice everything in sight and complete tasks in a straightforward and efficient manner. Instead, Guybrush takes a swipe at a hanging piece of rope, ”Hah-ha! Taste cold steel, feeble cannon restraint rope!” This is definitely not your average adventure hero. He’s got the arms of a palsied 7-year old with rickets!

What I’m getting at here is that our perception is partly shaped through our exploration (touching, smelling, walking, reaching at and taking things), partly through Guybrush’s relations to his world (how he judges things as valuable or interesting or frightening), and partly through Guybrush’s interactions with other characters in that world (how he addresses Wally or Murray the Demonic Skull, for instance). Of course, my perception is shaped partly by the fact that this is a 2D visual space with objects represented in spatial relationships to one another, but the fact is that those spatial mathematical relationships are not what makes the game “matter” for me. The game matters to me because somehow Guybrush has a quest worth pursuing, interesting relationships with his friends and enemies, and a hilarious world in which every action has some kind of unintended and hilarious outcome. So, the “interactive space” in which Guybrush’s world is expressed in is one inherently tied up with my cultural values, senses of humour and morality. Every element of style -- Guybrush’s gawky and loping stride, the expressionistic “painterly” style of the backgrounds, and the lateral-thinking approach to solving puzzles, together evoke an interactive space for the player that encourages creativity and a desire for hilarious misadventure.

Now imagine something different. Imagine that the player only cares about the linear plot, and could care less about the puzzles or fumbling around with each item on the screen. S/he grabs a walkthrough and burns his/her way through the entire game. This is a completely different kind of interactive space; one in which it is no longer experienced in terms of the player’s investment in Guybrush’s world per se, but rather a kind of “storybook” that gets played out in front of her/him. The range of possibilities for creative expression for this player is much, much, smaller than in our previous case. What I’m getting at is that the player has a personality or psychological habitude that typically results in a certain play-style that also contributes to the kind of interactive space s/he experiences. This means that the game’s design both sets limits on the kinds of experiences possible in the game, and the player’s expressive style also sets limits on the kinds of experiences they will have as they play. Players who refuse to “explore” or “dwell” in a world and who see the game as just a bunch of quests that they need plow through, or players who see a game as essentially a storybook or television show, lose out on other expressive qualities the game might have to offer. Alternately, players who see a game as a tool for their personal gratification are likely to miss out on the emotional aspects that the narrative or character interaction might offer.

Like many other kinds of creative games, LucasArt’s The Curse of Monkey Island offers a world that players can come to “dwell” in and understand the range of expression possible within it. Without an adequate understanding of space and how space creates metaphorical boundaries within which we can express things, I suspect that we will continue to reduce a game’s qualities to it’s formal graphical style (2D/3D/isometric/etc) or narrative style (linear/non-linear/emergent/etc). Space is always value-space or cultural-space or dwelling-space or emotional-space, and not the rational Cartesian coordinate space that we’ve been stuck with in our thoughts for over 400 years.

As a final example of an interactive space that encourages creativity, one of the funniest scenes in CMI:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=AawQvD8L_h4

Classic.

Please visit the Blog of the Round Table’s main hall for links to the rest of this month’s entries.

Note: If you’re a philosopher type, the thinkers who inspired this post were those from the Expressivist-Romantic tradition, like Charles Taylor, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Martin Heidegger.

Although I am still living in exile from my beloved blog, I did manage to get an editorial piece published over at Toronto Thumbs. In it I reflect on the problem of “nostalgia” and whether playing old games is a case of wearing rose-coloured glasses, or does it have to do with something something deeper..

Thank you to the Toronto Thumbs staff for giving me this opportunity to write something for them, especially to Sir Jamie Love for the impetus to try writing this in the first place.

Bye for now. Miss y’all!

For many of us, Zork hangs among our earliest memories of computer games. In many ways the series’ massive fanbase – in its entire gamut of casual and hardcore and obsessive players – is our miniature equivalent of the Star Wars fanbase: it is rabid.. it demands quality.. it cannot tolerate any deviation from canon.

So designing a new game based on the Zork franchise was a dicey and dangerous decision, especially considering the close ties the series has with the history of video games in general (it was among the first games derived from Colossal Cave Adventure). Stakes were high for everyone involved.

Yet, for every aging gamer out there worried about how the latest instalment of the Zork series would fare, there are 1000 more that did not grow up with text adventures. They did not get eaten by grues. They did not integrate the bizarre and off-kilter humor of The Great Underground Empire into their jargon. They are not used to directing a game’s action through computer-parsed language. They do not have to imagine themselves into a world constituted by text.

A Short Review

Here are a few comments selected from the aforementioned thread:

“That is my main and only complaint about the game: it’s absolutely passive. It’s the exact contrary of every other Zork game, where it was your wits and skills that saved the say rather than an automatic dice roll.”

“I like it and I’m playing it(played some beta aswell). I never played the original and frankly; I don’t wanna play text based rpg in this day and age.”

“I have a workmate who did grow up with the Zork originals and I pointed him in the direction of LoZ. His reaction is quite the opposite than John Biggs’ whereby he moans at me there aren’t enough action points in the new one (suggesting he wants to keep playing) but when he tried out the Flash based originals again, he was, like I was, simply frustrated by the continuous ‘I do not understand that word’ type of comments, and not knowing what phrases are actually accepted by the game.”

“Point and click/graphical games always will pale to each of our individual Zork experiences — at least for those of us who played the original text games. LoZ is the same. It isn’t much for “Zorkiness” as it’s a totally different style of game. But I really enjoy it.”

“Legends of Zork is the kind of game that you play for 10-15 minutes in the morning, between checking your e-mail and reading the news. It’s an entertaining diversion.”

These mixed reactions provide an interesting cross-section what happens when people have to make sense of a twist in the path. As several of the commenters point out, Legends of Zork is a turn-based lightweight RPG that is very reminiscent of the BBS door game Legend of the Red Dragon: you walk from town into the forest, kill monsters, return to town with loot, and rest when your hit points are low. In many ways, it is a browser-based incarnation of Diablo, sans a coherent storyline. All battles are decided through visible statistics: an encounter with an enemy plays back a script that describes hit percentages, chances of winning, experiences points gained, HPs lost, and zorkmids won. All and all, the game is a fantastic reinterpretation of hack’n'slash games, repackaged with an eye for 15-minute casual gaming. The artwork comprising the interface reminds me of both Professor Layton and the Curious Village, as well as The Curse of Monkey Island, and seems to do the trick.

Living with Cultural Change

Yet, if I may summarize the collective reaction, it goes something like this: “It’s a fun, cute, game. I can see some people liking it. But it’s no Zork.”

Beyond the pessimism of nostalgia, I think gamers have recognized that something is indeed missing in the formula. Sure, the writing might not be as humorous. Sure, the art style might not suit some people. Sure, going into statistical battles ain’t too much fun after a while. But I think something deeper, more dangerous, lies at the heart of the issue.

The problem is that Legends of Zork is the distant echo of a death knell that rang out in the 1990s when text adventures lost their sheen, and were replaced by clumsy graphical interpretations. Soon afterwards, graphical adventure games themselves were tossed in favour of real-time tactical and FPS games. A rift in our way of living, as gamers, has opened up between the 1980s and the present. Legends of Zork, while a noble attempt at bridging the gap between these alienated gaming eras, has only shown us just how wide the gap is.

The Dialectics of the Imagination and the Game

When I sit down to Zork I: The Great Underground Empire, I am greeted by a stark black space. I hit return – the space fills with white text against the black space – words! My eyes skim across the white-on-black space: I do not see words, I imagine places. I see things. I am located somewhere. The world opens up around me.

I am standing west of the white house. I imagine the texture of the boarded front door: When I was a young boy, there was an abandoned home down the street that I used to sneak into, and steal utensils from its dusty kitchen. The window was boarded up with rough spruce plywood, with a dark knot nestled into the top right corner. It is that rough piece of plywood that I imagine on the front door of the white house. The fear and excitement of the abandoned home is sparked in me for a moment – I do not consciously remember the abandoned home as I play – but the feelings it evokes persist.

I look over at the mailbox. The mailbox is the standard issue grey American mailbox that stands at the end of one’s yard. I recognize it from a scene in Stand By Me in which a group of hooligans drives around smashing mailboxes with a baseball bat. While I do not consciously remember the scene, my limited experience with Americana is stirred for a second.

Curious of the mailbox, my fingers dance over the keys on the keyboard – my eyes fixed on the screen. I do not consciously notice the keys clacking under my fingertips, but my intentions – my whole imagination – leans toward the mailbox.

I smirk a bit realizing how silly my action was – the world resists my clumsy intentions. I try again. This time my hands know exactly what to do. My fingers walk me to the mailbox.

It is one of the leaflets that I stuffed into people’s mailboxes in 1988, when I helped my mother distribute advertisements for a friend of hers who was running in a local election. I was nine years old. The leaflets were a bright orange, filled with text about the “New Democratic Party”. A large dog chased me from one of the yards, and I ran back to our Ford Econoline van, screaming and crying. It is that orange leaflet that I find in the mailbox, but I do not consciously recall the childhood memory of the leaflet – I am only filled with a sense of foreboding sparked by the terrifying dog. A call to adventure. I pick up the leaflet and read it.

I laugh and the tension is relieved. There is something strange about this place – a world that is part fictional world and part my world. I should be writing my dissertation, and the thought of it provokes guilt in me, but I want to play along. I want to be in the Great Underground Empire, just for a little while.

Imagination Lost

Legends of Zork is neither a bad game, nor is it a trivialization of the Zork series. It is the expression of the generational gap we find ourselves in today.

When I stare at the map of the Great Underground Empire as the creators of LoZ imagine it, my eyes take in the gorgeously drawn map – not the places themselves – but the world as seen from a bird’s eye view. I do not walk through the world. My fingers do not dance over the keyboard and do the walking for me. I point with my cursor, and the cursor – the computer and its algorithms – transports me to another place. I magically re-appear in front of the white house. But this is not the abandoned white house of my youth. It is not the house that I stole a rusted swiss-army knife from. It is a white house that corresponds to a popular modern children’s art style. It evokes nothing for me.

I click on the Dark Forest just as I would click on a news link or an RSS feed. The page reloads, and I am presented with a cute illustration of a forest and troll. I am about to choose whether I should run away or fight, but an AJAX script instead takes over and plays back the results of the battle – I do nothing. To the left of the adventure window is a menu that allows me to read a FAQ, change my account settings, or read posts over at the forums.

After a while, my interest wanes. I realize that the game is, for all intents and purposes, a wonderful thing in its own right. It is a game crafted for my 13-year-old cousin who spends most of his day on Facebook. It is crafted for him and his generation, because sitting in front of a black-and-white screen and walking through the world using his fingertips is not possible anymore. He does not imagine himself as a part of the Great Underground Empire, nor is he beckoned by the mailbox. He wants action and he wants cute illustration and he wants it now. He will use up his fifteen minutes of “action points” today and come back to the game tomorrow, nestled in between Twittering and posting his Facebook status. If I ask him, the art style will likely remind him of a handful of Miyazaki films that he’s seen. But it is not a part of his life – it is a part of his day.

Finding the Bridgeheads

We are likely to see more games like Legends of Zork in the future, and I welcome them. These kinds of games will come to define the basis for meaning for an entire generation of gamers that are coming into their own now, just as some of us did in the 1980s. No doubt some of those gamers will eventually come to reflect, not without a touch of sadness, that the games they played and loved as children are gone too.

I do not mourn the loss of text-adventure games; after all, I suspect that more text adventures are being crafted in the homes of indie game designers than ever were created back in the day. What I mourn is the loss of a way of life. Gamer culture has changed so much that a new Zork adventure game no longer would make sense to us. And we know it ourselves: one commenter said that he was “simply frustrated by the continuous ‘I do not understand that word’ type of comments, and not knowing what phrases are actually accepted by the game.”

I am fragmented inside. Part of who I am – my identity as a gamer – still lives in a world where my fingertips walked me through the Great Underground Empire like little feet in a vast geography. The GUE is world that lives only in my fingertips and my mind; the game itself is only a focus for my imagination. But it is the past, and I can only look back it over a great distance. 

Another part of me lives in the present. I walk in the Fallout 3 world by holding down the ‘W’ key. Every detail of that world – from the shapes of the mountains to the kinds of needles on the trees, has been provided for me. When I reach out to open a mailbox, I never fail. I hit the ‘E’ key. I cannot fail at opening the mailbox for a computer algorithm opens the mailbox for me. The mailbox opens without the help of my imagination.

Bridging the gap between these two estranged worlds requires something more than a translation of Zork for a new audience. It requires that we, as gamers, discover new ways of using our imaginations in a world that all but prevents us from doing so. It requires that we, as developers, discover ways of expressing subtlety and nuance using whatever tools we have. It requires that we, as an older generation, find common ground with younger gamers and share in new gaming experiences with them. The outrage levied at Legends of Zork is in many ways unfounded; it is a projection of anger stemming from our social anomie.

Until we locate those bridgeheads and begin building common experiences between them, I think that we will find ourselves constantly disappointed with anything new.

“To me, part of the art is really understanding the story… to me, if you boil music down to one element that’s a really important thing when it comes to emotion… it’s tempo! Tempo is what conveys emotion and conveys energy. You find tempo in speech, speech is musical.”

I nod, encouraging him to go on with the thought, doing my best not to interrupt with the thousands of ideas he evokes in my mind as he speaks about his music. We order a couple more cappuccinos and try to concentrate on the conversation… we are becoming drowned out by the shrill cackling of the cafe patrons beside us. I slide the microphone a little closer to him, angling it away from the next table.

An hour passes. I ask him about his experiences composing the Outcast soundtrack, and how they compare to the Watchmen Motion Comic score that he completed earlier this year. I keep asking myself: what is it about music that compels him to compose?

“There is a spirituality with art… it’s sort of like you’re tapping into the divine. There are times when I feel like I’ve come close to it in my compositions.”

My heart flutters a bit as fragments of the Heaven on Adelpha track bubble into my mind. There are moments of his music that border on the sublime, and I tell him that. He humbly thanks me, almost embarrassed that I would mention it. We turn towards the subtleties of compositional techniques – 4/4 to 5/4 time transitions, sustains, and writing for 100 piece orchestras.

I’m getting a crash course in composing from Lennie Moore, video game and film composer. And I’m loving it.

6:17pm.

I am greeted at the door by a blonde woman dressed in a red hood, stitched roughly at the joints with thick black thread. She smiles and bites her lip sensuously, as the tip of her polished black shoe twirls on the concrete.

There is a photograph in her hand. I reach towards it, tentatively. The photograph leaves her hand, falling. The photograph is in my hand. It is a photograph of a young girl dressed in a red hood. It reads: “Robin. Age 9.”

I thank the red hooded woman and walk into the lobby of the Yerba Buena Center of the Arts and encounter a throng of well-dressed folks. I do not recognize any faces, and walk over to the bar, doing my best to fly casual. I spot a man in a suit, wearing a thick but carefully-groomed beard. If it were not for his slender build, I would think him Amish or Mennonite. Someone cracks a joke and he throws his head back, laughing wildly. Definitely not Amish.

He is standing at the top of a curved staircase, and waves at everyone: “Come up here! It begins soon!” His accent is subtle, smooth.

We follow him up the stairs into a small theatre, seated for 100 people or so. A stunning woman with braided hair walks to the stage.

“As you can see, I’m a bit nervous.” She laughs, relieving the tension.

She introduces herself as Auriea Harvey, and welcomes the bearded man to the stage, introducing him as Michäel Samyn. She introduces their newest creation, The Path, and welcomes us to the launch party. The Tale of Tales team introduces each of the six characters of the game in six short stories.

The lights dim, and a young girl with a slight limp appears on the screen. She wanders off the path and into the dark forest. I am mesmerized — my heart pounds as I anticipate some nameless horror. I am not afraid – but I am fearful.

There is a polaroid photograph of a nine-year-old girl named Robin in my hand. I am sitting in a theatre, watching Tale of Tales graciously demo The Path.  And I am loving it.

This is the GDC.