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.

“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.

I remember that when I was young, getting a new game was about as exciting as my father coming home with a new bicycle. As I’ve mentioned in a prior post, Monkey Island 2 has a special place in my heart. It was the first game that my sister and I pooled our money together for, after months of back-breaking work on our farm, feeding horses and mowing acres of lawn. In those days, the recession of the early 1990s was hitting my family pretty hard. My mother was attending university at the time, and my father’s carpentry business was not going well at all; money was a constant problem around the house. While my parents paid my sister and I an allowance for doing chores around the acreage, I knew that an allowance was a frivolity that my parents could barely afford. Buying a new game with months worth of our pooled chore money was a big deal.

I would tear open the box as soon as we had left the store, and start digging into the manual. The 45-minute car ride back to my family’s acreage was like torture. The Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge box art (painted by Steve Purcell) became a playground for my imagination; by the time we arrived home I had already created a world and story based on what I saw on the box. My sister and I traded pieces of the game back and forth as we drove home, but inevitably there was something about the box’s front cover art that we both were attracted to. There was something about the cover art that invoked our imaginations. It had horrible tension, an utterly terrifying pirate on the front, and it told a story in one glance: whoever that guy is on the left, he’s in trouble!

So when the new cover art appeared recently for the upcoming release of Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge, I could not help but notice a stylistic change in the box art. I could not put my finger on it, but it felt like something was missing in the overall presentation. Fearing that this was mere nostalgia rearing its ugly head, I decided to do a side-by-side comparison of the old and the new box art, as well as some of Steve Purcell’s previously unreleased box art. In this article I borrow some terminology from an art critic by the name of Heinrich Wölfflin to help out in distinguishing between the two styles. Keep in mind that I’m no art historian or critic, so any errors I make are mine alone, and not Wölfflin’s. Thanks to Martyn Zachary of Slowdown.vg for posting his own comparison, and my friend Melinda for letting me know about Wölfflin in the first place.

Left: Steve Purcell’s original box art. Right: the new box art.
(click here to compare the box art at higher resolution)

From Painterly to Linear

Wölfflin wanted to distinguish between artistic styles based on a handful of objective principles. The most important, to me, is his distinction between linear and painterly. Wölfflin himself writes, in a linear style, ”stress is laid on the limits of things; in the other the work tends to look limitless. Seeing by volumes and outlines isolates objects: for the painterly eye, they merge. In [a linear painting] interest lies more in the perception of individual material objects as solid, tangible bodies; in [a painterly painting], in the apprehension of the world as a shifting semblance.” In my own words: linear styles tend to define sharp separations between objects, while painterly styles tend to allow things in the scene to flow into one another. Linear paintings also tend to have “flat” surfaces, make use of photorealism, and are often seen in comic-book style artwork. Painterly works rely upon visible brush strokes that give the piece a “textured” appearance, usually use wider brushes, and mix together uniform colours in the same region for expressive effect.

So how do I see this playing a role in the above paintings? The original Monkey Island 2 box art by Steve Purcell on the left seems to take a more painterly approach, while the new box art on the right takes a more linear approach. Look at LeChuck’s beard in Purcell’s painting: a light source from the mast plays off his beard, creating a strange mix of yellows, browns and oranges. In the new box art, LeChuck’s beard is no longer curly and frazzled, but a series of grey-black blocks. The ropes on Purcell’s work are textured and tactile, while the new artist flattens all texture out of them so they blend into the background. Guybrush goes from a flowing and smooth style in Purcell’s painting, to a series of geometric angles in the new painting (compare the shirt collars and hair for instance).

What does this ACTUALLY mean for a player?

The overall effect is that the second work is presented in a much more linear manner than Purcell’s original (more painterly) work. While the depicted content of the two paintings are almost identical (they both have the same objects), the expressive qualities are certainly different. The new painting “flattens” out all features for an overall balance between each element of the scene; in particular the bodies of LeChuck, the voodoo doll, and Guybrush are “equally important” to the scene. My eye is caught by the pin in LeChuck’s hand, but afterwards I find myself struggling to follow the action of the scene. Guybrush might either be playing Hide-and-Go-Seek, listening to an iPod, or in actual physical pain. I can’t tell, given the (lack of) expression on his face. LeChuck looks non-human, comic bookish, and a hobbyist evil-doer. The monkey on the mast is either whistling or leering. Because nothing is textured or exaggerated for expressive effect, I don’t have much of an emotional “grip” on the scene.

In Purcell’s painting, he is clearly playing favourites: my eye immediately goes to LeChuck’s face, then to what he is staring at (the voodoo doll), then to the threatening hand, and finally to Guybrush’s agonized face. Purcell wants to tell the story of Monkey Island in one glance, and he excels at it. My emotional grip is set up by the kind of story that Purcell is trying to tell, where there is explicit tension between the characters. Guybrush isn’t just in pain, he is in agony as LeChuck tortures him. LeChuck isn’t just a goofy villain with an obsession for voodoo dolls, but a human being-truly-gone-bad, evidenced in his “undead” look. The monkey on the mast looks truly concerned, mirroring our own horror at the sight of LeChuck.

In the end, the new cover art loses all of its dramatic tension, giving way to Monkey Island’s lighter comedic side. The new cover art belongs to a generation of gamers, in my opinion, that welcome flat representation over painterly expression. As photorealism and linear comic book artwork become increasingly popular among gamers, I suspect that we will see less of Purcell’s painterly style, and more linear and representational art styles. Given the differences in how I understand the narrative (see above) through the cover art, a move to linear styles might be to our detriment as gamers who want a good yarn.

At the same time, Wölfflin’s point was there neither linear nor painterly styles are “better” than one another, they just express different things. Ultimately however, this depends on how you see each art style. Which of the above appeals to you more? Why?

Finally, here are some original unreleased paintings that Steve Purcell did for Monkey Island 2. Note that these are even more painterly in style than the final box art:

“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.

Customization may seem to offer developers and players alike a chance to mask, to separate an avatar from its perfunctory position and move it closer to the player, bridging the gap between various players of different origins, but due to the avatar’s function as a literary element, a character never does become perfectly liberated from its original environs and place of creation.

After wading through so many awful, pretentious and intellectualistic blog posts over the years, Martyn’s post seized me right away. It is thoughtful, smart, and honest. And important to anyone who thinks in terms of the idea of a gamer community, it leaves the door open for re-articulation and consideration; not just opinion launching. But before, before you read my response, read Martyn’s excellent article for yourself.

In this article I want to very quickly sketch out my re-take of Avataritis, and try to contextualize the problem in terms of a psychology of defense, and show that gamers fall prey to some of the same problems that my students do. I may just fall into a pit of crocodiles on this one, so read generously

Without going into the rugged details of psychoanalysis, one of Freud’s most successful disciples was the therapist, inventor, philosophy, and thinker, Wilhelm Reich. Reich’s particular interpretation of psychoanalysis met a lot of opposition, in particular to his hands-on (literally!) approach to therapy – in many cases he would massage the tight muscles of his patients during conversation in analysis. Much of Reich’s psychoanalysis focused on the body – its internal structure, spiritual structure, and (most important for us) the body’s visible surface structure.

Reich argued that the body develops an “armour” after enduring years of sexual oppression in order to restrict one’s desires. When we develop body armour, we physically become rigidified and stilted – our muscles become tense in order to enframe an anxiety-ridden and explosive inner core of emotion and sexual energy. (Reich accordingly glorified the orgasm as a way of breaking-through such body armour).

If you’re still with me, I hope that you are beginning to tack on the same wind as I: the gamer’s body armour prevents genuine identification and dwelling with a game’s protagonist.

What I’m getting at here is the idea that our body physically becomes tense and expressively constrained as we attempt to immunize ourselves from our own emotions, desires, wishes, drives or urges. I see it all the time at work – my students come in looking vigilant, self-conscious, jaw-set, stoney-eyed, tightfisted, and socially withdrawn.

And the gamers among my students are even more shy, and typically avoid eye contact and any expressive gesturing as they speak quietly about the games that they so dearly love. The gamers, and I know this feeling very well myself (read Michael Abbott’s courageous post, Sheepish Gaming for a sense of it), sense that games are a taboo and unsavory topic inappropriate for public expression. The result is an expressively crippled gamer whose desires become wrapped up inside themselves and never find much expression among their colleagues. Even in the cases where people are quite social about their gaming habits and find a community to share it with (ie. here!), the societal taboo that adults have no business in child’s play persists and colours us.

If I’m already treading water here with you so far, just so you know, I plan to drown us both.

The sheepish gamer – the gamer who builds their body armour in relation to a society that remains fully vigilant in enacting taboos – eventually returns to the inner sanctum of their bedroom or office and loads up their favourite game. But they find that they can’t quite relate to the protagonist. Their character seems too unlike them, too alien in her (or his) features. But the armoured gamer is no longer identifying with the character’s inner sense of life – their emotions and desires – but their outer physical appearance.

Many of my students have the same problem – they all judge books by their cover or give an author a perfunctory read and claim, “I couldn’t relate. He was too different from me.” This defensive kind of position, like a queen hiding in a fortress only allowing in to the courtyard those whom she deems to be enough like her, is paralyzing. The vast majority of students who I know, live in a world where they constantly feel besieged and unable to express their emotions and wishes or worries – they never quite make contact with other people, movies, authors, or games. Instead, they judge all things with their vigilant eyes and make mountains out of physical features; another person’s body (or an author’s text) is seen as a surface, and not a promise to something deeper.

The armoured gamer is in the same boat. The on-screen protagonist is seen as a modifiable shell, and if it doesn’t look like them or someone they like, the protagonist instantly becomes judged as unrelatable. Customizable avatars have become so rampant because designers have realized that gamers have changed their understandings of themselves as surfaces and now demand a playable character that mirrors their self-understanding. That is why the “Master Chief” in Halo effectively has no inner emotional structure nor desires; s/he is just a surface. Just a body with armour. And people identify with the Master Chief because s/he already mirrors the life of the armoured gamer. Samus Aran does not need to have an inner self – she is a shell with a scantily clad body inside.

As Jamie Love masterfully notes, Metroid relies upon the “presentation of an empowered and heroic female character – the concept that only a woman can bring balance to the universe. Yet, as empowering as this idea is, it is simultaneously undermined by the artificial enhancement of the power suit that grants Samus the ability to confront these challenges… the suit empowers her while also masking her female identity beneath a generic male template of power that relies on technological augmentations.” Armoured gamers do not identify with Samus – they identify with the suit.

I’m not suggesting that this generalizes to all gamers, nor sufficiently characterizes the life of a single gamer. I’m just suggesting that the sudden appearance of customizable avatars is not some freak coincidence nor a poor design choice that spread like wildfire, but a response to a society who already understands themselves in terms of modifiable surfaces: the body is just a hanger for clothing and hairstyle. The inner being, whoever or whatever it is, must remain hidden at all costs.

In specific response to Martyn’s wonderfully inspiring post, he is no doubt right. I want more games that focus upon proper narrative characterization (in fact, I wrote several articles about this idea years ago), and I want PCs whose inner lives somehow draw me into their troubles. I don’t want to birth or create a character – I want the character to recreate me, as Cervantes’s character Don Quixote does so well. Customizable avatars will not disappear until gamers themselves become willing to experience the game world in terms of the PC’s desires and wishes and worries and not their own egocentric (and self-protective) world. That is a playful, more loving, form of identification.

Again, I realize that I’ve likely offended many of you. This was not my intent. Like Martyn, I wanted to offer that there is a subtler, more intimate, understanding of gamers than is traditionally bandied around on places like Gamasutra who ignore gamer psychology completely. Designers often try to design-their-way-around or completely eradicate the gamer’s social personality, and I think that’s a mistake.

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!

In this article I’d like to introduce some of Eriq’s wonderful work done for notable game developers such as AGDInteractive/Himalaya Studios, Infamous Adventures, and Telltale Games, among others. Eriq’s work demonstrates the kinds of deep, expressive, worlds possible when artists with a rich background in gaming transform their imaginations into ink and paint strokes.

Eriq has graciously contributed two previously unseen production illustrations from a cancelled King’s Quest IV remake, and concept art for the upcoming game PartWorld.

But before we get into the nitty-gritty of Eriq’s art, I think that it’s important that we try to understand the kind of inspiration and devotion that must go into re-imagining artwork that played a central role in our collective childhoods. Re-imagining a game is not mere nostalgia.

When I was 10 years old, my family moved to a new province, a new school, new friends, a new way of life. My mother began taking courses at the University of Alberta, and one of our new necessities was a computer that she could write her term papers on. One day my parents announced that they were driving to the city to look for a new couch at their favourite furniture store, “The Brick”. Hours later, they came back with a new couch… and a few nondescript heavy cardboard boxes that read “AMSTRAD PC2086/30” and “STAR NX-1000″ on the side. Any box with model numbers on the sides like that had to have electronics inside. I dug into them immediately, and found (packed in industrial-strength styrofoam) -- an Amstrad 286 PC, its matching VGA/EGA monitor, and a dot matrix printer. Excuse my crude patois, but, I just about shit my pants.

“Careful.. that thing cost us $3500..” my father warned, worried that we might drop something. My sister and I unpacked the machine and gingerly set it on top of an old oak desk in the den. Thinking we could just turn it on and step into a world of flashy colour and sound, we stared blankly at the mundane “C> ” prompt that greeted us after booting it up.

My mother promptly walked out of the den and brought back a computer game they had bought for us the same day. ”The guy at the The Brick said you would guys would probably like this game.” She peeled off the $69.99 sticker and handed it to us.

The cover depicted a princess riding a unicorn, fleeing the clutches of a terrifying winged gargoyle. The title read: King’s Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella. For a second time that evening, my sister and I were awestruck.

I spent the next two hours fumbling with the arcane art of MS-DOS 3.3 as my sister read aloud from the beautiful gold-embossed game manual. When the title screen for the game finally popped up, and the PC Speaker screeched its beepy-boopy tunes, we were enchanted. The smooth animation and bright colours gave the game a magical, life-like feeling. “Tamir” was a fantastic world hidden on the other side of the monitor that was revealed to us as we explored in it. It felt like a kingdom crafted just for us.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=tilHBUKcOtY

We played the game every day for over a year. One of us would draw out a map of the area and suggest possible quest solutions, and the person in front of the keyboard would type in commands and walk Rosella from place to place. Sometimes our neighbourhood friends would visit and we would all take turns in the hot seat typing-in (usually raunchy) commands. King’s Quest IV was not just something we played to pass the time… it was a daily event.

Every area in the game felt alive in some way. The ocean surf licked the sand as sea gulls meandered the blue sky… smoke drifted from a chimney far off in the distance… Rosella would fall off of sharp precipices if you were not careful enough… Rosella’s pigtails swish-swished in the air as she strutted. While both of us had played video games prior to this -- in the arcades, on the Apple //e, and Mattel Intellivision -- we had never seen something so… animated!

This is not just about my childhood. I promise.

While all of these graphical achievements no doubt involved impressive technological feats on behalf of programmers and designers over at Sierra On-Line, the technical triumphs were not what grounded the experiences for us. What made the world of Tamir live for us was its expressive qualities… dwarfs acted like dwarfs, the fisherman was as curmudgeonly in his walk as he was in his gruff speech, and the musical score cued in the haunted wood is frightening. Each scene was crafted to exploit a ‘feeling’ or ‘sense’ through its careful attention to colour palette, visual depth, characterization, and score. None of these details I noticed as a child -- but as an adult they stand out as clear examples of how to express a world rather than design one.

This is the kind of artistic magic that Eriq Chang captures in his illustrations -- the truth of far off places and characters that resonate with our imaginations. His work demonstrates the ability to integrate three artistic practices that I believe are absolutely crucial in breathing new life into graphic adventures: painstaking attention to the little details that gave Sierra On-Line’s artwork its signature illustrative style, a long-standing commitment to his passion for the wonders of childhood, and a wild modern twist that brightly lifts out the essence of a scene.

What the heck does that all mean? It means that Eriq Chang has somehow managed to pull together an artistic style that revitalizes dead culture. His work is both a hearkening back to the lost days of youth, and a looking forward to new experiences and ways of seeing things. It is not mere nostalgia or fan-art. In the exclusive artwork that Eriq has contributed (below), the radical changes in illustrative style both remain faithful to Sierra On-Line’s in-house graphic artists, and bring a new creative depth to them.

I call this a “renaissance” of computer game re-makes because the creative torch has finally been returned to artists. Instead of designing and conceiving games from scratch without any attention to their expressive qualities (as we see in most commercial games), AGDInteractive and Himalaya Studios have put artists behind the wheel and allowed them to drive the creative process. The recent Quest for Glory II: Trial by Fire remake very much has that sense -- see Michael Abbott’s post over at the Brainy Gamer for more praise of the game.

What follows are a few production illustrations that Eriq created for a King’s Quest IV re-make that was unfortunately cancelled. Eriq has also contributed concept art from his new upcoming game Part World (yet-to-be formally announced).

In the below scene, the heroine of King’s Quest IV, Rosella, approaches the quaint home of the Seven Dwarfs:

In the following scene Rosella is carried away by Lolotte’s evil gargoyle-like henchmen; a dark and dangerous twisty path climbs into the horizon:

Concept art of a scene from the upcoming graphic adventure PartWorld that is being co-designed by Brandon Klassen and Eriq Chang:

If you’d like to play an excellent adventure game, and receive a bonus Quest for Glory II poster created by the artist himself (the poster is gorgeous and printed on very high quality stock, trust me)… head on over to Himalaya Studios’ Al Emmo and the Lost Dutchman’s Mine web site. With his stylus dipped in so many different projects and production teams, I suspect that we are just seeing the beginning of Eriq’s influence in the flourishing new world of graphic adventures.

I would like to recognize the rest of the hard-working crew over at AGDInteractive who, through their commitment to the highest degree of artistry and love for their work, have revitalized the past by creating in the present. Thank you -- we as gamers, role-players, adults, children, artists, parents, and readers, appreciate your devoted efforts.