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.

I turned back to her son, and he was frowning intently at the Game Boy. He reached out tentatively and pushed on the plastic screen. Nothing happened. He pushed again, in a different spot. Nothing. I reached over and pushed a button -- Mario jumped. He looked at me with a puzzled expression, and turned back to the game. I eventually had to slide his fingers over to the D-Pad and buttons, pushed them down a few times to show him how it worked, and he started to “get it”.

I realized in that moment that we are now living in a time when the standard D-PAD + Buttons layout can no longer be assumed the “standard” way of playing a game. A new generation of players are growing up with motion-based interfaces from Sony (the upcoming Playstation Move), Nintendo (Wii MotionPlus, Balance Board), Harmonix (Rock Band), as well as touch based devices from Apple (iPod Touch/iPhone). Where the 1980s and 1990s almost always guaranteed a familiar mediating interface -- whether it be a keyboard, mouse, or D-Pad -- I wonder at how the recent explosion of alternative interfaces has changed the way gamers understand what a game is?

For instance, can we really say that Myst or Monkey Island 2 SE for PC are the “same games” as their iPhone variants? On what basis could we distinguish between our experience of playing the two (temporarily setting aside differences in sound quality, resolution, etc)? Is the “touch” aspect really that different from a point-n-click interface using the mouse?

I’m going to waffle here, because I just don’t know. And here’s why:

When I play any game, using a standard NES/PS2/PS3/Xbox/GameCube controller layout -- my fingers and thumbs find their places. If it’s a NES, my right thumb handles the A+B buttons while my left thumb takes care of the D-Pad. There are no moments of confusion, I never have to ask myself, “which button is it again?”. The same goes for the PS2 and PS3 games: my fingers know their business. As soon as I settle down to play the game, my fingers are no longer fingers to me. They are a part of the game -- my fingers become something like my mouth when I am speaking -- they spring into action when Mario needs to bound over a Chain Chomp or needs to go down a green pipe. My fingers never become a part of my foreground or focal experience -- in other words, my fingers become repressed parts of my bodily experience.¹ If I had to think about what I was going to do next before committing myself to the act, Super Mario 3 would become unplayable.² In other words, games like Mario 3 require us to forget that we have fingers for a few moments in order to bring a natural flow into the game. Without getting too artsy or mixing metaphors, many games demand that the player become a pianist of a kind.

Mouse-based interfaces that we typically see in adventure games require a different kind of skilfulness. My hand has to learn to map the horizontal two-dimensional space of the mouse to an on-screen virtual space. I have to learn that forwards-is-up, and backwards-is-down, and that I have to move the cursor to the right position in order to make my character do something. In this kind of interface, I still “repress” my hand -- at some point my hand disappears and the cursor becomes invisible to me. The cursor moves simultaneously with my hand. My hand knows where it needs to go on-screen in order to make Guybrush Threepwood pick up a wooden mallet. I don’t think to myself: there is a mallet, and I need to click ‘pick up’, then click on the mallet. Exploring the world of Monkey Island 2 becomes a natural gesture for me.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiYUIcxibtY

(this review demonstrates how focal one’s finger can become when playing Myst on a touch device)

But can the same be said for touch-based devices that require us to make physical contact with the display in order to play the game? For instance, while the Myst interface is more or less the same between the PC/Mac and iPhone versions, the fact that I have to occlude some of the screen with my fingertip in order to “do” something changes the game subtly. Every time I reach forward and click on the screen with my finger I feel the cool glass push back at me, and I leave a fingerprint. There is something very focal in interacting with touch-based devices, because my finger does not fall into the background as easily. Compare that to the PC version: my hand is always on the mouse, my fingers always in their familiar positions on the mouse buttons. They never leave that surface, and the mouse becomes an extension of my body. On the iPod, my finger is constantly leaving the surface, popping in and out of my visual field.

But it’s the same game, right? Not for me. While the iPhone version of Myst is a wonderful port of the original game, I cannot quite dwell in the world simply because I cannot repress my awareness of my fingertips. I feel like I am playing a game. It is not quite bad enough to totally remove me from the world, but it is enough to remind me that yes -- I am playing a game on my iPod Touch and this is a virtual/fictional world that I am interacting with. The PC version of Myst is nothing like that -- when I click something I am reaching into the world and flipping a toggle switch.

Returning to my anecdote: does my friend’s 2 1/2 year old son experience his favourite iPod Touch game as a ‘real’ world? Or is his experience like mine — somewhat disembodied and self-conscious? Is this an inherent problem with touch-based interfaces, or do some of us already experience bodily repression that allows us to ignore our fingertips when we touch the display? How much have designers appreciated the qualitative change in gameplay experience as a result of the massive turn towards touch-based gaming, and have they done anything to respond to it? What are your experiences with touch-based (or even motion-based) interfaces; how do they change your experience of the game?

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:

• 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.

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.

A developer himself, Eric Viennot has interviewed Chahi and Mechner, each answering the same question. It is an interesting opportunity to see how two authors who may share a spiritual style, living on opposite sides of the ocean, come up with different answers. I firmly believe that a game can (and must!) be understood and enjoyed without referring to the life of the artist or their opinion, but for those who have already played their games and admire their artistic styles, the interview is a goldmine. This is part of a series of interviews that Viennot has done of the giants of gaming… a prior interview between Frédérick Raynal (Alone in the Dark) and Paul Cuisset (Flashback: The Quest for Identity) is just as fascinating. I hope that you can read French – if not, try out one of the various translators (Google translate seems to do an okay job)… otherwise, Gamasutra is in the midst of translating the latest interview into english.

I’m sitting in my 13-year-old cousin’s room, my back leaned uncomfortably against the foot of his metal bedframe, watching him play Jak 3 -- a 3-D shooter/racer/adventure platformer. He finishes a level and we watch the intro cinematic for the next quest; the on-screen drama unfolds slowly as the characters discuss what to do next. We are 30 seconds into the cinematic, and already I can hear my cousin becoming restless, thumbing the ‘x’ button so he can skip the cinematic and cut to the chase.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnZo2zVhonM

(Herding Leaping Lizards in Jak 3.)

Damas enters stage left and addresses Jak and Daxter (and of course myself and my cousin) in a paternal tone, ”You have a reputation for being rash. Didn’t your father tell you to pick your battles wisely?”

Jak responds, “I didn’t know my father.”

Damas continues, “My point is, sometimes you face your enemy head-on and, sometimes you wait until his weakness is revealed! Patience is a warrior’s greatest weapon.”

(To any seasoned gamer, the discover-the-end-boss’s-weakness-by-experimenting-and-observing-it-at-a-distance tactic has the cornerstone of battle for over 20 years.)

At this point, my cousin who is normally a patient and curious child, is becoming irritated with the “unreasonably” long 1-minute cinematic. I realize that he has listened to nothing in the cinematic, he even misses the crucial mission briefing, “I want you to go into the desert and herd a group of lizards into a waiting transport.”

And he’s off, driving around aimlessly in the desert. At some point the game prompts him with a message, “Drive up close to a Leaper.” After chasing a pack of lizards for a few minutes he is becoming frustrated. The lizards dart off in every direction and his thumbs respond in kind, directing the stick toward the Leaper Lizards, but not quickly enough. They get away. After several tries, he manages to land Daxter on one’s back, unsuccessfully trying to direct it toward the village. The lizard has a mind of its own and resists him, he fails to jump over a small cactus, and the lizard dies. The level resets to a few moments earlier. I can hear him slamming the thumbsticks helplessly as he becomes discouraged, and he eventually drops the controller on the  bed.

“See? This game sucks. It’s soooooo hard. Let’s play something else.”

It is the last time he ever plays Jak 3.

I shrug sympathetically and pick up the controller to give it a shot. Despite never playing the Jak series before, my fingers find themselves singing an old song, and I begin exploring the territory with the dune buggy. I get a sense of the geography, the pitfalls and mission targets, and the surprisingly agile driving model. I spot a pack of lizards in the distance and my fingers instinctively accelerate and steer the dune buggy toward them… I accidentally pancake two lizards (the speed of this thing!), but Daxter manages to saddle himself on the third survivor. The encumbered lizard drives like a cat-drawn dogsled, and I laugh as I feebly try to direct it toward the mission goal area.

Eventually, I succeed. It is a silly level and a silly game, with no real consequences for failure -- cute and inoffensive. My cousin is astounded that I complete the level, and shuts off the PS2. Months later, we are talking about the recently-released Prince of Persia (2008) - he is ecstatic about the gameplay feature that prevents the Prince from dying, owing to an infinite number of “saving” catches that Elika makes, preventing any kind of failure.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDloiadrCNM

(feel free to hum along to the amazing tunes of Space Harrier )

I realize at that moment, my cousin and I live radically different childhoods. Mine is populated with memories of Black Belt, Police Quest 2, and Prince of Persia. All of these games, for different reasons, were exercises in utterly inhuman frustration -- whether due to a demand for obscenely quick reflexes, a talent for guessing at verbs in a command parser, or repeating the same level twenty-five times just to discover the “trick” to finishing it. Finishing a game enabled a sacred rite of bragging among friends at school; it was a badge of honour and a sign of manhood accessible to only those elite who had done the same, like knowing the secret password for the neighbourhood treehouse. (We even demanded a photograph of the end-game screen of Space Harrier when my friend finally beat the game in grade 10 because it was so unbelievable a feat). At the same time, those experiences came at the cost of sheer uncontrollable rage. When I was 12 years old, after three hours I flawlessly got to the cavern level in Choplifter and was summarily blown out of the sky by the ejecta of an erupting volcano -- I tried to break the controller in half unsuccessfully and instead threw it against the wall leaving a 3-inch hole. I am not, and never have been, a talented gamer.

But for my cousin, none of these experiences are possible anymore. Jak 3 does not inspire frustration or rage, but disappointment and discouragement. When a game becomes difficult it is not a challenge to his identity as a gamer, and because of which inspires no tenacity in him. If he cannot continue with a game, he turns to a different one. He has never finished a game in his life, nor experiences a desire to do so and would rather try the next new game that captures his attention.

I’m trying to avoid being unfair to my cousin whom I adore. He is a very bright teenager, he desires a sense of accomplishment, and he is surprised and enamoured when he sees an old hand effortlessly flying through Super Mario 3 and Mega Man 2 - games he sees so beyond his skill-level that they inspire only fear. But despite owning game systems his whole life, if they were taken away he would simply watch TV or play with his iPod touch instead. Even the thought of losing my Genesis or Nintendo would have chilled my heart as a boy.

But why would this even matter? Isn’t my cousin’s experience of gaming just “different” than mine, and I’m just a gamer-veteran levying my adult judgments on him? Maybe. But maybe it’s something else -- along with my childhood and all of the dramatic emotions, skilful practice, and social confrontations I had in relation to games -- that my cousin’s world is just a little less colourful, a little less distinct, and full of nameless fears that discourage him from really feeling a deep connection to the games he plays. The Jak 3 story would have enraptured me as a child -- an Oedipal story ripped right out of Star Wars about a boy who comes to learn the identity of his estranged father. But my cousin, as a boy raised in a world of confusing gender identities at home and school and on TV, is not grabbed at all by the story; as Baudrillard writes, “The Oedipal drama is not played out any longer.”

So, why are our childhoods experienced so differently in terms of the games we play, and how we play them? This is where I want to leave things open for debate. Michael Chabon suggests that it is because parents have become too safety-oriented, too afraid of the unknown lurking in the urban world. Roger Ebert believes that we live in a fear-inspiring society that discourages us from becoming “free range children”. J.H. Van den Berg believes it is because children and adults are estranged from one another’s lives, and children no longer can mature naturally. Baudrillard believes it is because post-modernity has turned the child into a fetish-object.

Those all seem to be sensible parts of the whole shebang. Yet, rather than finding ways of maturing kids through the games they play, we now craft games to suit a flattened kind of childhood, one with no real consequences for death, or even the chance to die unfairly. It’s a kind of liberalistic ideal: Everyone should win. A game like The Last Express, by definition, will not interest my cousin because it is based on the idea of exploration for its own sake.

I’m not sure what the answer is here, for in my generation my parents were never involved in gaming in any direct way. But for this generation the answer will be in the realm of good guardianship I think: letting your kids fail, letting them get frustrated with the harshness of the world, and gently encouraging them to keep plugging away at it until they grow that kernel of accomplishment and develop a sense of courage for themselves. Otherwise, the games they play will forever remain a distant dark continent that does not inspire them to jump off of their carefully-padded ships and explore them heroically.

Am I being too naive or idealistic about childhood? Has your play style evolved over the years? Or do you have a child/relative/friend that plays games in a radically different way than you do? If so, I’d love to hear about it in the comments!

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!

I’m not much for hyping up news, but I came across quite a few exciting stories this week. Because writing ‘feature articles’ is so darned difficult, I thought that an occasional ‘Artful Times’ newsletter might be a fun way to end the week

GDC ’09

The 2009 GDC begins next monday, and I’ll be there! If you’d like to get together for a lunch or coffee, please drop me a line. This is my first GDC and I plan to document the whole thing as well as do a handful of interviews while I’m there. I’ll post whatever I can here during the week!

Lovin’ Rhythm

Jamie Love posted a very enjoyable interview with japanese rhythm master Masaya Matsuura, otherwise recognized for his brilliant PaRappa the Rapper series that initiated the whole ‘rhythm game’ genre. Matsuura does not appear often in interviews, and his insights into Western (and japanese) gaming culture are poignant. In response to the idea that we, as gamers, tend to idolize certain characters and games from our past that are nonetheless exploited commercially in sequel after sequel; sacrificing our personal values for profit, he says:

We should talk about cultural values and proprietary values separately. Nowadays, nobody really has the idea that “Copies” are worse than the “Original” anymore. When I think about that, it is no wonder that new ways of thinking about possession will be eventually spreading and changing. When, for example, we have a million seller game, it is difficult for us to decide if there is only one main character, or a million of them, but for now we should appreciate that both assumptions can be held as valid.

I think companies and/or producers have a tough mission to bring imaginary characters to life both culturally and proprietarily. Also the imaginary character will doubtless become increasingly realistic and tangible in the near future. Then we will be forced to rethink how we treat them once again.

(Apologies for the news image – I couldn’t help myself)

New Bible Unearthed; Church of the Mushroom Cloud Believers Deny Existence

Over at the IDGA Game Preservation Mailing List, Elliot Davis mentioned that someone has posted a scan of the complete design document for the cancelled Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel 2 game. We all know that Brotherhood of Steel was a terrible followup to Fallout 1 and 2, but apparently BoS was only intended to cover the costs of the game engine. BoS 2 was the game that Interplay wanted to pursue – but filed for bankruptcy before production could begin. The design “Bible” reads like a D&D campaign manual and features a lot of previously unseen sketches and artwork consistent with the Fallout universe. I suggest getting it while it’s hot – who knows how long it’ll be before the nasty C&D letters are fired off.

“Ifnkovhgroghprm” actually means “Nikstlitselpmur”

AGDInteractive let me know that their amazing re-makes of King’s Quest I and King’s Quest II have been once again remade! The artists have went back to them and redrawn all of the background art at high resolution, and made improvements to the music and speech packs. (Not to mention that their website was re-designed and re-launched by the wonderful Eriq Chang). After investing thousands of hours in these projects, their efforts have finally been ‘rewarded’ and recognized by Activision (the company that swallowed up Vivendi & Sierra On-Line’s properties): in a newsletter AGDI said, “We were informed that Activision would honor our outstanding agreements with Vivendi by allowing us to finish our pending contractual projects, but that we will not be granted permission to start any new Sierra remakes in the future.” Bad news: we won’t see a King’s Quest IV or Quest for Glory remake. Good news: we’ll see Himalaya Studios work on their own original ideas and hopefully see a new adventure game in the next couple of years!

(and if you recognized the title of this news item, you’ve played too much King’s Quest)

A History of LucasArts – Thankfully not written by George Lucas

Although the book was released in December 08, I somehow missed it! Rob Smith, the editor of PlayStation magazine, writes the history of LucasArts and fills it with amazing (previously unseen!) production artwork and paintings. I have some strong attachments to LucasArts, despite their 10 year dive into obscurity. The years between Maniac Mansion and Grim Fandango punctuated some of the best gaming experiences of my adolescent and post-adolescent life. Even now, when I load up Loom and Sam and Max Hit the Road on my Nintendo DS (thank you ScummVM!) I am reminded that true mastery involves insight and constant revision. I’m looking forward to reading this book; if you have read it, please chime in with your (dis)recommendation. This seems like a nice coffee table book, especially with the glossy photos inside.

Home of the Underdogs Revived After Being Euthanized

And I wasn’t planning on announcing this for at least another two weeks, but my good friend gnome das Gnome’s Lair beat me to it After Sarinee, the old curator and creator of Home of the Underdogs (a site devoted to posting ye olde abandoned games) lost HoTU due to a mixture of disinterest and her web host dying, a few folks from the community decided to lend a hand and get it back up to speed. There are several ongoing revitalization projects, but the one that has caught my attention the most is HOTUD.org – a complete revision of the site using Joomla and community-driven content. The site is currently in an ‘alpha’ stage and you should not yet start posting reviews/content, but if you’re as excited as I am about the project, head over to the forum to keep an eye on the site development. We’ll let everyone know there when it’s ready to rock’n'roll.

A Bit of History

In the last three years I have witnessed a trend in game journalism and game writing. Throughout the 80s and 90s, and the first half of the new millennium, major print publishers were our primary source of game reviews. Cries of review bias and a lack of journalistic integrity were ubiquitous in the 90s… and represented a general discomfort with the idea of a publication being the arms-length advertising appendage of a major console/game publisher. Especially now, it is hard to conceive of Nintendo Power as a credible journalistic source. But, I can remember being 13 years old, dropping five bucks every month on the latest copy of GamePro magazine, knowing that its reviews were skewed at best, and all-out fabricated at worst. I bought a copy of Faceball 2000 for my GameBoy based on a raving review, only to find out it was a horrifically unplayable bastardization of Wolfenstein 3-D. But I still swallowed it, and purchased games in a frenzy.

The De-institutionalization Movement.

Fast-forward to 2005. Twenty years of cynicism mounted, and the “indie” game movement was gaining momentum. All of a sudden gamers and bloggers alike were crying for deeper, less biased, reviews of games. For the next couple of years we tossed accusations of marketing bias and journalistic poverty at the major online review networks, and saw them slowly crumble to what they are now. And I should be clear here… I think the de-institutionalization of game reviewing/writing was a major and welcome disruption of the status quo, and we are better for it. We saw smaller blogs sprout from the collective disillusionment, and the last three years have seen a gradual growth of this “new games journalism”, such that now I do not even find myself cruising the major gaming news networks for information on the latest’n'greatest.

A New Hope.

Now that the great publishing beasts have been defeated and their ashes scattered to the four corners of the Earth, we might take a brief respite to mull over where we have ended up. The “New Games Journalism” movement proposed originally in Kieron Gillen’s Manifesto gave some of us the courage to write about our “subjective” experiences of games. And there is something liberating in the idea: instead of relying upon the traditional objective review criteria (ie. on a 1-10 scale) we could turn to our experiences for inspiration. Like Tom Wolfe, we were going to embrace the “I” in game writing. We were going to build new communities of thinkers and write deeper, more insightful, ways of understanding the boxes of bits and bytes we’ve treasured for the last 30 years.

The New Dire Straits.

But something happened along the way that corrupted the heart of the NGJ ideal. Instead of becoming deeper and more insightful, we became pretentiously intellectual. Instead of writing about our personal connections to games and what they mean for the entire social collective as loving/breathing/thinking human beings, we write about our individual opinions. Instead of understanding the game-player dialectic as a holism – one implying and transforming the other – we atomize and deconstruct gameplay and player experiences as separate things. Instead of providing deep critiques of games and reflect upon what they express of our societies as they are now, the vast majority of critiques cherry-pick superficial aspects of a game – such as an NPC’s skin-colour or gender – and perpetuate the very stereotypes they wish to undermine. Journalistic objectivity has been replaced by opinion and thinned-down experiences, rather than exploring how games-publishers-societies-experiences set the stage for our opinions of them. We ignore hundreds of years of thought on the review of art and aesthetics, and instead feed off of the blogs and inane personal judgements of game developers who are themselves part of the mess.

Most disturbing in this stillborn transition to a NGJ, I think, is an insidious double-move that involves both the critique and reliance upon “AAA” publishers and the games they release. Where the major online and print publishers of yesteryear were financially dependent upon AAA developers, we have become personally dependent upon them in terms of our identities. Yes, we rant and rave that Electronic Arts and (to a lesser extent) Ubisoft refuse to “innovate” and have become creatively complacent institutions. We pick-apart their games and show that the games they release lack interesting characters, stories, novel narrative approaches, artistic details, and rely upon tired genres and franchises. But in doing that – what new insights about the relations between human beings and games have we come to? None. Or worse, this. We now consume game writing in the same way we consume games. I assure you that the AAA publishers have not suffered because of us.

This New Games Journalism – that was originally supposed to be something like travel writing – was profoundly corrupted in a consumeristic way of thinking about gaming. Instead of reading print mags, we now rely upon blogger “impressions” or “analyses” to justify our purchasing habits, just as we have already been doing for the last 20 years. In the end, journalistic coverage of new game titles consist of “previews” or “reviews” based on web-culled images and personal opinions, the modern re-incarnation of a blogger-driven GamePro. The advertising arms of Nintendo and Sony, where once were discernible in the popular “official” magazines and criticized on that basis, have now been fully integrated in blogger game writing. We now are at the edge of the most pernicious form of self-censorship possible: we have come to understand our tastes and subjective experiences in terms of the individual consumption that the AAA game economy relies upon while at the same time pretending and affirming that our tastes are trustworthy and personal in themselves. We consume games, and write many things about them, and believe that our self-created “communities” of consumption are thoughtful, social, and sufficiently critical. They are not.

The Way Out.

I recognize that this argument will receive some opposition, especially from those deeply committed to game writing and their particular game-playing habits. I recognize my own complacency here – in most articles I have written over the years there is an enticing view of the gamer as someone on a self-critical quest for meaning and self-transformation. Rather than presuming who we are as gamers (which I myself have done for too many years), it is the gamer her/him-self who needs to question his attachment to games.

A New New Games Journalism is concerned with our very being-as-gamers, in light of the specific games we play. It is concerned with how games are both the expression of our societies and selves, and how they come to shape our personal lives in how we play them. It is not based on our opinions of whether a particular game is good or bad or boring or fun, but rather whether we should be playing these games at all or doing other kinds of things. It should be concerned with how we can play games in the light of certain personal goals, or show how particular games transform us to see the world in certain ways. It will be concerned with understanding if games are actually playful or if they are steeped in some other form of activity like consumption or violence. This New New Games Journalism has to give us new opportunities for expressing ourselves in the social arenas we live in, rather than new opportunities for self-censorship and its associated self-deception.

We must write our personal narratives and think about them – just as Kieron Gillen pointed us towards – and show how they fall into a larger living world beyond mere opinion. And in doing that we have to resist the temptation to institutionalize game writing as form of rigid and lazy academic thought, a malignant tumour already beginning to metastasize in some places, and pursue it as a form of poetic self-expression. Game journalism can be just as exciting and enlightening as playing games themselves!

Yes, de-institutionalizing game writing was a step in the right direction, yes we need to become better writers (as Chris Buffa notes), and yes getting rid of objective review criteria was a good thing. Now is the time to take the ball and run with it – we have been running-in-place at the 50 yard line for far too long. There are already some writers out there trying to eke out an existence in the collective roar, but they remain at the fringes of what is read, and require more critical engagement in order to come to a fuller and less fragmented expression. We need a new community of writers willing to try something new together, rather than perpetuate the existing style.

With all the pomp and circumstance of a 15th century aristocrat, I pronounce the New Games Journalism movement dead, rotting in the ground, and in need of a successor.

Long live New New Games Journalism!

Update: Brendan Caldwell wrote an excellent response to my article (and several others on NGJ) that both critiques my position as he sees it, and brings up new, thoughtful questions about the practice of game writing. I highly recommend reading it.

Author’s note: Although this article has been worded quite strongly,  I truly mean no personal disrespect to the writers and gamers and journalists implied or critiqued here. Rather, this is an opportunity to really open up a new discourse on game writing that is sorely overdue. I hope that this produces (even heated) responses, rather than quashes them.

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.

I’m excited to get back to our regularly scheduled programming, and I’m proud to launch into the new year with the second article in our Origin Museum series. In this part of the series, Joe Garrity (curator of the Origin Museum) shares his story of giving Richard Garriott a very special gift during the University of Texas Video Game Archive Fundraiser at Britannia Manor in 2007. The degree of craftsmanship that went into the gift is reminiscent of Infocom and Ultima ”feelies” – the expression of an artist’s love for their work, and I believe demonstrates how games not only entertain and surprise us – but how they can lead to new works of art and relationships with those around us.

Joe writes:

“This one is not really an Origin artifact, but it’s related to game collecting — The Ultima Reagent Box.  A presentation we created ourselves, it’s a display case of all of the genuine real-world reagents that are used for spell-casting in the Ultima games.  It took quite a while to collect all of these items, but the end result was worth it.

After the wonderful meeting with Richard Garriott at Britannia Manor in 2001, Paula (my wife) and I wanted to do something nice for him, as a way of saying thank you.  We occasionally send him silly Christmas gifts, just to let him know that we’re still around.  [Knowing that he’s passionate about exploration, we once splurged 20 bucks, and  purchased for him an official deed to a square mile of property—on the ocean floor!]

The Reagent Box ended up to be a 2-year effort in finding the individual reagents and binding each to a velvet base with brass wire, presenting them with a 19th-century-scientific look.  The center item is a mortar and pestle, with the reagents surrounding it, and an identifying brass plaque under each one, (written in Ultima runic, of course).  Finding each reagent gave us little mini-adventures—each one more interesting than the next.  Some examples:

Mandrake Root — Never order anything from an online Wiccan shop….witches are the WORST spammers.  I actually had to abandon an email account because of this.

Nightshade — We happen to be fortunate enough to live in an area where Solanum Americanum grows naturally.  Armed with a bunch of Internet pictures, we went on many weekend hikes in our local nature preserves.  Although not a protected species, it was probably still illegal to take that snipped sample of our quarry (and we even included some berries from the plant!).

Sulfurous Ash — I acquired some natural sulfur chunks at a hobby shop (don’t ask me why they were there), and made the necessary preparations to burn it outside, and make some ash.  Note—Sulfur is an ELEMENT—it cannot be broken down into lesser components!  (I can be really stupid sometimes!)  By the time I had made this brilliant deduction, I discovered 2 more interesting facts.  

1. Sulfur burns extremely well, and extremely hot!  Had I not been insightful enough to burn this on a piece of flagstone, it could’ve very easily gotten out of control—nothing puts it out!
2. Sulfur fumes are TOXIC—I almost passed out in the back yard!  After this idiotic experiment, I ended up smearing some ashes on the sulfur chunk—it was as close as we could get.

Blood Moss — A quick search on the Internet reveals nothing about Blood Moss.  Was it made up for Ultima, and doesn’t really exist?  I had to find out.  I used to work for the Department of Agriculture, so I asked many of my co-workers (who dealt with grain inspection) about blood moss.  None of them had ever heard of a ‘red moss that attacks grain’ (according to Ultima lore).  Not wanting to give up, I scheduled an appointment at the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History.  I actually was escorted to the top of the Museum’s dome, where I spent almost 30 minutes with a dusty scientist, going thru dozens of sample drawers, looking for Blood Moss.  When we finally gave up, as he was apologizing for not being able to help me, another botanist was grabbing his coat, and leaving for the night.  My new scientist friend yells, “Hey Bob—do you know what Blood Moss is?”  The other botanist replies (without breaking his stride), “Oh—you mean Sphagnum moss.”  We both race to stop him and ask him more.  It turns out that Sphagnum moss was used in medieval times as an impromptu bandage during jousting, because of it’s naturally antiseptic properties, and it’s absorbency to soak up blood, hence the moniker ‘Blood Moss’.

Once completed, we had another brass plaque made, with the following message on the back:

Richard,
You enrich the lives of millions as your vision creates worlds. May your future endeavors bring you much success.

Evolve, Experiment, Enlighten, Explore, but…

Never forget your roots.

Joe and Paula Garrity
Curators of The Origin Museum

Once it was finished, I had a piece of framed glass made to complete the presentation.  I had also wanted to attach a tiny hammer on a chain to the side, with a runic message saying, “In case of Moongate—Break Glass”.  Paula thought it was overkill.

I presented it to Richard privately at the U of T Videogame Archives Fundraiser.  Although he was very busy that night, he seemed very appreciative, and called it ‘absolutely amazing’, and ‘a new piece of Ultima history’.  Many months later, someone showed me a picture from the Internet of the inside of the NCSoft offices, and there was our Reagent Box, displayed on top of a bookcase.”

- Joe Garrity
Curator, The Origin Museum

Editor’s note: Once again, I’d like to thank Joe for sharing this story with us. Given that most of us are satisfied in playing games (and sometimes writing about ‘em), it’s inspiring to see people as devoted to the Ultima series as Joe and Paula are. Since this article was originally written, Richard Garriott has left NCSoft to pursue personal projects. In a recent interview with the BBC, he announced that he is looking forward to developing a new medieval online game. 

For the next couple of weeks I’ll be posting a three-part series of articles based on several conversations I’ve had with Mr. Joe Garrity, curator of the The Origin Museum. You might remember Joe as the mastermind behind the scenes of a massive video game archival operation that took place earlier this summer at Mythic Studios, where 1 Terabyte of artifacts, source code, artwork, FMV, and design documents were salvaged from Electronic Arts’ archives of the defunct Origin Systems Inc. In this series of articles Joe tells us some of the stories behind artifacts recovered from Origin Systems (the creators of the Ultima and Wing Commander series). In our first part of the series, Joe reveals some (until now) unseen artwork by Dan Bourbonnais -- an artist that worked during Origin’s “Age of Enlightenment”, and shows us some of the painstaking artistic work that goes into game production.

From stunning concept painting…

…to final digital 16-color artwork… (Chsheket, an important NPC in Ultima: Worlds of Adventure 2: Martian Dreams.)

First off, Dan Bourbonnais was a staff artist for Origin in it’s hey-day (1988 to 1992)--He did artwork for many famous (and infamous) Origin games, including Wing Commander, Ultima VI, Savage Empire, and Martian Dreams.  I’ve always been interested in how artwork was integrated into the older games, before digital tablets, and 3D modeling software--you know, old-school.

I have what I call my ‘Grail Diary’ of Origin Museum info--a little leather book of notes, contact info, ideas, thoughts, etc.  I also keep a ‘wish list’ of Origin people that I admire, or want to communicate with someday.

Once in a while I’ll go back to that list, and try and look up some info on the names.  I was doing searches on Dan Bourbonnais’ email address, and I stumbled across his phone number.  ‘Cold-calling’ people is always a pretty risky thing to do--if handled wrong, it can close doors, rather than open them!  This was one of those few times that I thought ‘what the heck’, and just dialed.

Usually in these situations, all I expect is a hello, an email address, and a 5 minute conversation.  Dan was a wonderful guy, and seemed genuinely appreciative that I had called.  He spent over 30 minutes with me, answering all of my questions on his career, and telling a story or two on the old days.  Although Dan is out of the gaming business (working for a big-name architectural firm in Indiana), he still looks fondly back on the times when his art was used for gaming worlds.

As I was thanking him for taking my call, he said, “Wait--I still have some old stuff from back in the Origin days.  If you give me your address, I’ll send them to you.  It’s not much, but there are some disks that might still have data on them.”  I was very appreciative, and thanked him immensely.

When the package arrived, I was awestruck—There were 2 boxes of 5.25″ disks, but all of them were in bad shape (don’t worry-I’m working on recovering the data).  There was an original artwork of a familiar character from Martian Dreams (one of the robots) that Dan apparently used as part of his resume.  He also included an Origin folder (see above) that he designed, and in it were 2 unusual art pieces—animation-type celluloids of spaceship interiors that looked very familiar.  It took my brain a couple of minutes to register—these were backgrounds from Kilrathi ships, used in the opening animatics from Wing Commander II!  The most interesting aspect of these cels is that back in the early 90s, artists apparently still used traditional techniques in developing game art, instead of today’s rendering software.  They would then take these artworks and scan them into digital files, to be used in the game.  One of the cels is multi-layered, which could just be a method of correcting a mistake, or adding details to the image.  After shooting off some pics to the Wing Commander news guys, they provided me with screenshots of the game that show the artwork.

From original cel painting…	From original cel painting…
… to digitized 256-color artwork used in the Wing Commander II Demo…	… to digitized 256-color artwork used in the Wing Commander II Demo…
… to final digital artwork used in Wing Commander II.	… to final digital artwork used in Wing Commander II.

Note: Wing Commander II images courtesy of WCNews.com

These artifacts are a very significant piece of history in videogames, because they show the transition between the standard techniques and today’s modern graphic development.  The fact that they are from the intro to a popular game gives them a connection to game enthusiasts, and adds to the ‘wow’ factor.

- Joe Garrity
Curator, The Origin Museum.

Editor’s note: Joe, thank you very much for giving us this glimpse into ‘the story behind the painting’ and these wonderful pieces of artwork. If you’d like to see how this artwork inspired the artwork in the final release of Wing Commander II, watch the full introduction sequence below:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfAoVX_VWWs