When I read Jorge Albor’s recent post “True and False Memories” over at Experience Points, I was genuinely touched by the experience he earnestly articulated. He describes the intense feeling of familiarity and comfort that we have when we play certain games; I can think of no better term to describe that feeling than what Jorge calls “homecoming”. In Jorge’s case, that feeling of homecoming appeared when he inhabited the familiar space, the sights and sounds, of Aperture Labs in Portal 2. Like picking up a new pair of shoes and finding out that they fit just like a pair in childhood did. Jorge rightly distinguishes homecoming from recollection – the latter being a specific memory tied to a specific past, while the former being a feeling tied to an imagined past. In this post I try to work out what homecoming means, and show that it is neither a case of false memory or nostalgia, but rather a different kind of true memory: one that discloses a personal past that should-have-been.
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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.
Every time I hear Infocom’s text adventure Planetfall brought up amongst gamers, usually my age or a bit older, someone inevitably brings up their relationship with Floyd – a little ‘bot that is your sole partner for the bulk of the game. Floyd follows you around the abandoned planet, making the occasional smart-assed comment, and helps with the occasional task. At a critical moment of the game, Floyd – and I quote wikipedia here – “performs the ultimate sacrifice and gives his life to retrieve the vital Miniaturization Card from the Biolab” 1.
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.)
Recently, my sister referred me to an article that made quite a splash on the Wall Street Journal by Amy Chua: “Why Chinese Mothers are Superior”. (Read it first if you have not). The article is certainly polemical, and it paints a bleak picture of the Chua household: no sleepovers, no playdates, no being in school plays/drama, no watching tv or playing computer games, and above all “no grade less than an A”, etc etc. This is the familiar stereotypical picture of a household run purely on achievement, instrumentality, outcomes and accomplishments. It is a familiar morality tale that could come from the confines of an upper-class household in Victorian England.
Excluded from that life, by definition, is anything that will not lead to a positive outcome in the parent’s eyes (these of course are defined economically: getting a high-paying job, graduating magna cum laude at an Ivy League school, receiving educational awards). I have no opinion on whether or not Amy Chua (a professor of Law and economic commentator at Yale) is a good or bad mother, or whether her children are good or bad people. Those conversations have been had.
Instead, I want to know: if a family excludes play from the household or puts major restrictions upon its expression, what kinds of values are being ignored or denied to the child?
Due to the fact that I got married over the weekend, I neglected to mention that the two very articulate gentlemen who write the Experience Points blog and podcast - Scott Juster and Jorge Albor – spoke for a few hours with yours truly. We spent most of our time discussing a recent article of mine: The Neurotic Joy of Gaming, trying to collectively understand what kind of play “mastery” is and what it means for gamers. I feel privileged to have been on their podcast, and I can’t wait until I get another chance to sit down and talk with them (perhaps next time over a beer).
If you can stand my tremendously Canadian accent, feel free to listen in on our conversation here. The show notes are also available here.
Nels Anderson recently pointed out a post over at Jamie Madigan’s Psychology of Video Games blog. While Madigan’s post does not really say anything new (and is based on the kinds of experimental social scientific research that went out of style in the 1960s – sorry, couldn’t help myself), it does bring up the most important unanswered question that we have as gamers: Why do we play video games?
Nels takes us a large step in the right direction towards understanding this problem when he observes (in his own response to Madigan’s post) that, “We need better ways to talk about what makes games enjoyable.” Gamers, I’ve found, lack articulacy when it comes to understanding our own experiences playing games. Sure, we can go on for hours about what we like/dislike about the game’s rules or design, which characters we found empathizable and which we could not connect with, or how “immersive” the world is. But that’s not the same as being articulate about our own experiences and what they mean to us. Speaking articulately about ourselves requires some kind of language to put things into perspective, especially when it comes to sketching out what makes playing games so darned enjoyable.
Towards that, I want to play with the idea of “mastery” that both Madigan and Nels mention, and how mastering a game is its own enjoyment.
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The other day I was having coffee with friends who brought their 2 1/2 year old son over for a visit. He was bored, looking for anything to do in our (boring) house – so I handed him an original Game Boy with Super Mario Land 2. I figured that a toddler would enjoy smashing the Game Boy’s bulletproof buttons, making Mario run and jump, and hearing the ear-piercing four-channel music. He took the Game Boy from my hand with interest, and held onto it in the familiar way that all of us hold portables. He looked at the cabbage-green screen and squealed, “MARRIOO!” I asked his mother if he had played games before, and she said, “Oh yeah. He loves playing kiddie games on our iPhone.”
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:
The other day I was shopping at “Canadian Tire” (a chain of department stores in Canada, like Wal-Mart), and I noticed a father loading a brand new pink bicycle onto his truck. I saw it as a girly bike – the kind with multicoloured tassels flaring from the handle grips, white plastic training wheels haphazardly poking out of the sides, and a bare frame anxiously waiting to have My Little Pony stickers pasted all over it. I smirked a bit, and kept walking. As I passed the man’s truck, I saw his little girl sitting on the passenger seat, peering through the back window as her father loaded the bike. The look on her face – I cannot find the words to express it – was ecstatic! She was bouncing all over the seat, squealing excitedly like only a 4-year-old can. Like the infamous N64 Kids she looked to be in sheer bliss.
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.
A few minutes ago I got a text message from a friend of mine who’s been playing Assassin’s Creed 2 on his PS3. The message read “Turns out AC2 is a very frustrating game, and this controllers fly apart like a chinese motorcycle.. lol”, with it the following photo (see left) was attached. I was disturbed, but not surprised, to see that kind of behaviour in a 30 year old man. The same went for a friend of mine whose 4 year old son threw his Gamecube controller at the family LCD tv, smashing it to pieces (see below). A mother I knew had two young sons who fought incessantly over the use of the computer to play Ultima Online, to the point of one of them destroying it in rage and jealousy. I asked myself: why do people become destructive in an activity that is supposed to be pleasurable?
I can remember my first bout of rage at a video game: it was ChopLifter for the Sega Master System when I was 12 years old. After many hours of play I had managed to get to one of the last levels without losing a single helicopter. In a matter of 30 seconds as I tried to fly through a cavern full of lava, I lost all three of my lives. I distinctly remember shrieking in rage, trying to rip the controller into shreds, and finally throwing it into the wall (to no avail). I shut off the system and stomped off, never to play the game again.
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