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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’ve been dying to review Policenauts for months, but wanted to try something slightly different since it was an unpaid, unofficial, translation team that took on the job of translating this Japanese cult classic into English. I managed to track down Marc Laidlaw, the lead translator on the project, who was generous in answering some questions I had about the game and the localization process.

The editors and writers of 4colorrebellion were gracious in offering me a space for such a wonderful interview. Specifically, I wish to thank my friend Jamie Love for his hard work in setting me up over at 4CR, and putting together the entire article in its final form. Head over to my 4colorrebellion article to read the entire inter-review.

According to the authors (one of which is our very own gnome of The Gnome’s Lair!), Retroaction will be issued one per season; four times a year. The first issue is roughly separated into four parts – a main feature on The Legend of Wukong (a new Sega MD/Genesis title), pretty darned in-depth coverage of the 2008 Retro Remakes Competition, a small feature on the UK-based television show “GamesMaster”, and a wonderful assortment of articles that focus on games for (mostly European) systems like the ZX ‘Speccy’ Spectrum, BBC ‘Beeb’ Micro, Amiga, Amstrad CPC, etc. Like any good retro gaming publication, the types of articles vary so much that I think anyone should find something they like in it.

Interested yet? Head on over to Retroaction and download the first issue (in Adobe PDF format). If you like what these dedicated authors and publishers have done, be sure to drop them a line over at their forums and let them know!

If you’re interested in what I think about Issue #1, read onwards…

After bemoaning the state of video game journalism a couple of weeks ago, I was very pleasantly surprised to see something new on the horizon for us battleworn gamers. Sure, Retroaction isn’t (meant to be) a deep investigation into the sociology and psychology of gaming – but it does two things that I think are absolutely vital for meaningful writing: 1. It brings back the excitement and pleasure of computer and video game history in bright, expressive colours; 2. It manages to show off the wonder of retro gaming without becoming a bunch of egocentric statements about how games make the authors feel. Those two aspects of the magazine, taken together, manage to evoke the past in the present and make me care about retro gaming.

First – the layout. It is the work of a gifted graphic designer that knows how text and images can flow together to create a coherent and beautiful page. The bright text on dark pages – often with several layers of background images – gives the magazine a real sense of depth. In fact, I enjoy this layout more than I did the layout of the original The Escapist magazine. Why? Because it’s great to finally see someone making proper use of hyperlinks in a publication! And (in case you’re wondering) it loaded up just fine on my iPod Touch (which has become my magazine reading device on the train).

In terms of writing, I like it. It’s informal, quirky, and chock full of information. As I said, it’s not going to win any Pulitzers for cultural and emotional depth, but the sheer genuineness of a fan-loved piece of work won me over. This is what I want to read when I sit down at the table in the morning and sip at my first ‘americano’ of the day.

Content. Jeez, I don’t know how they managed to put out a 62-page magazine on their first go. I’m guessing that future issues might be a wee bit shorter – I can’t imagine how much time this took to put together. I thought that the Retro Remakes section was well covered, and I appreciated the amount of detail several of the reviews went in to (however I must admit that I skimmed through the games that I didn’t find particularly interesting). The mix of content on television, video games, computer games, and printed publications was impressive. It’s not too broad, and just narrow enough I think. However, if you’re a console fan, the pickins’ are a bit thin. Personally, I don’t miss the lean selection of console games to be honest – I think consoles have been covered to death in the media, and it’s nice seeing the ‘Speccy’ and ‘Beeb’ get their due. As a Canadian, I am skewed a bit towards the Commodore 64 and IBM PC – so hopefully those will get a bit more pagespace in future issues. But I have no complaints to be honest – I had a great laugh reading their review of Sensible Software’s Sensible Train-spotting, which was news to me.

Altogether, I’m pretty stunned by their achievement. Makes me wish that I wrote articles for them instead! 

And if this were a printed magazine – you bet I’d buy it.

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.

Note: This is way too long, but it is the quickly-written culmination of six years of study in my life. I’d like to thank Corvus for launching us into the heart of the problem concerning stories and games. Without the kind of community that has come together through Man Bytes Blog, this quality of discussion would never be possible.

In Corvus’s piece, we get a coherent and readily understandable view of narratives and stories. I’ll do my best to characterize the view: The author conceives of and produces a story, and the audience interacts (with the author) through the narrative to co-author a coherent, feelingful, set of connected events. Therefore, the author is not in pure “control” of the story… the audience assists in the construction of the temporality of the story. A story, according to Corvus’s interpretation of Eco (which is in turn an interpretation of Russian Formalism through the lens of narratology), is the crafting of a fabula; a coherent logical structure that grows out of the audience’s interaction with a text, film, game, song, etc.

There is something very tempting in this view, because it implies that the reader/player/audience exerts some amount of authorial control, as they story only emerges through their participation in creating it. However, I’d like us to keep in mind that a “narratological” view of stories is only one particular, through powerful, perspective on stories.

Narratology is a kind of “semiotic” approach to story. Although there have been many different interpretations of what a narratological approach implies (Roland Barthes is a particularly important figure here), Eco’s approach shares much with the rest. The general idea is that a story is a text comprised of sentences, and each sentence is comprised of words. At each hierarchical level of analysis (ie. words -> sentences -> characters -> plot), there is a “logical structure”, and the meaning of a story is created through the relations of its logical structures. So let’s take Corvus’s description of how this would work:

Jack was a short man,

Depending on your impression of/experience with pulp detective novels, the 1930s, short men, and people named Jack, you’ve likely formed something of a mental picture.

Jack was a short man, with a bitter laugh.

I would be willing to bet you’re now picturing Jack’s face more clearly. Perhaps hearing his laughter. You may even be imagining the sort of person he is based upon the knowledge that his laugh is bitter.

Jack was a short man, with a bitter laugh. All his life, Jack felt uncomfortable in his own skin.

Do you perhaps feel a twinge of sympathy for Jack? Are you smoothing out his temperament a bit? Imagining for him a self-conscious mannerism?

Setting aside Corvus’s interpretations of the story for a moment, this is an example of the way narratologists work. A story is made up of a bunch of sentences that can be strung together in different ways in order to create different meanings. There is something very logical about the audience understanding a story in this way. We logically relate each sentence to all the sentences around them, and recognize a meaning from the entire collection of sentences.

What underlies this entire procedure is the assumption that sentences (and words, and stories) are composed of “information” -- logical bits that can be transformed by logical operations. The author creates a text (a game, song, or film) by arranging bits of information into coherent and logical structures. We, as the audience (players, listeners, watchers), perform our own logical operations on the text in order to derive a meaning from it. As Corvus notes, we as the audience usually ‘add our own information to the story’ and thus transform the story into a different meaning.

What comes out of this view is that both the author, and the audience, are information managers/transformers. We perform different logical operations on the story and glean a meaning out of it. The question is if there is a limitation in this view? It seems plausible.

First, an objection on behalf of narratology. A narratologist such as Barthes would have a fit if he heard that the story was crafted from a kind of communication between the author and the audience. Barthes puts his whole reputation on the line to demonstrate that a story is meaningful because it is not a dialogue between the author and the audience, nor is it meaningful because an author exerts her/his control over the text. For Barthes, the head-honcho when it comes to narratology, the story’s meaning lies purely in the audience’s interpretation of it. Although I have not read Eco’s work in much detail, if he is a card-carrying narratologist, the idea that the author and audience communicate in order to create meaning would shiver his spine. Rather, narratologists are much more concerned with the audience’s interaction with the text (game, song, film) itself.. the author disappears after the text has been created. Any suggestion that the reader could write a letter to the author to confirm the ‘true meaning’ of the story (as if the author had any sovereign access to it) would have no place in Barthes’s (and I suspect Eco’s) view of narratives.

The reason I beleaguer this point is that I believe that Corvus’s view of stories has the opportunity to look far beyond a logical, semiotic, narratological, view. I think he is concerned with something much broader, concerned with the “hermeneutics” (read: interpretation) of story, which implies the author, the text, and the audience. In a literary hermeneutics (which was originally conceived of in the interpretation of the meaning and translation of Biblical texts), we focus on understanding how the reader (the particular reader -- you -- not just anyone!) understands the story in the light of the cultures and communities they live in, the themes and metaphors and archetypes that the author draws upon, and the specific feelings and experiences that the story evokes in the person.

Think of any game that really grips you or grabs your attention. Planescape: Torment, Final Fantasy VII, or even Flashback: The Quest for Identity come to mind for me. There is something about the story of Flashback that, even now, still manages to grab me. Even though the protagonist of the story, Conrad, never quite develops into a thick character, I still felt compelled by his personal journey. What is it about this man, who crash-lands his flying bike into a jungle, and loses his memory, that compels me to help him along? It is not because I intellectually interpret his situation and follow the bread crumb trail. There is a personal contribution I make here: Conrad’s world is one that makes sense to me. “New Washington” is an Orwellian urban landscape, “The Death Tower” (a game reminiscent of The Running Man) is frightening and perverse, and the alien “morphs” propose the terrifying prospect of a race of identitylessness humanoids. All of these meanings are not my subjective invention .. the story emerges from  my engagement with it in the world.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=jiaRJitrGQc

This view includes the semiotic perspective that Barthes and Eco propose… but instead of turning a story into a hierarchical arrangement of logical rules and structures… it invites the audience and story into a dialogue with one another. The text (game, song, film), the particular reader, their personal experiences, their society, and the author, comprise a complete storied world together. As the audience participates in their own hermeneutics of the art-object, the story is understood and transformed, as the person understands and transforms their personal world. There is no “text” nor “audience” nor “author” that can stand on its own… story-audience-author-culture co-constitute one another. 

If this is a bit unclear, which I apologize for, think of two romantic couples. One couple has been together for years, and have ‘grown into’ one another… there is a unity to their experience such that the wife can speak for her husband, and the husband can speak for his wife, without any confusion. When one person speaks, s/he speaks the mind of the couple. Now imagine a couple that has been together for a short time and discuss things with one another. When the boyfriend speaks, he tells his girlfriend about his experiences. She responds to him, trying to understand ‘his experience’. They are two solitary points on the map, sending messages to one another, each trying to respond and understand the best they can. The older married couple does not “communicate” to each other -- they simply relate and respond. The younger couple “communicates” and don’t respond to one another -- they are separate individuals.

Hermeneutics (or, more correctly, “expressivist hermeneutics”) thinks of stories much more like the older couple. When I read a story, if I understand it at all, my whole life is implied in it. My personal relationships, my upbringing, the author’s literary style, the particular archetypes used, my feelings, and the style in which I read or play, all come together in a world. Every part of this world is connected to one another. Creating a meaning out of a story is not my personal “subjective” domain, but it is part of a much larger world that I am implied in.

What this means for storytellers and for story-listeners is that they are already engaging in this kind of hermeneutics. Yes, of course there are structural elements to it that are part of our understanding (ie. Aristotle’s suggestion that every story has a beginning, middle, and end), but those structures and logic are not what makes a story grip our hearts. What is primary, I think, and Corvus seems to be implying in his very compelling perspective, is that the way we as readers help author and understand a story through our hermeneutical practices. When we read or play or listen to something, we often do not even recognize that we are engaging in this hermeneutics. It is not based on a logical, conscious, process of operations on a text. It is based on our embodied, feelingful, personal, interpretations that come from our participation in a culture. Flashback means something to me because it expresses a world to me -- I don’t need to consciously interpret it -- it is simply true to my life.

There is a psychology here that matters greatly for our lives. The readers (players, listeners, viewers) who are truly moved and transformed by a good story are something like that elderly married couple -- the story speaks for their life as they speak for the story. The folks (like myself at times!) who stand around the edges of the story and take pot-shots at interpreting what it means are more like the young couple… hopelessly trying to intellectually understand something without really letting it change them. The authors (designers, writers, painters) who do not let their work emerge on its own, and instead attempt to control and manipulate it into a particular meaning, never in the end create a true work of art. Stories transform the imagination, as our imagination transform them.

This is why, months ago, I wrote the article “Narratives and Interactivity Still Misunderstood“. We, as computer users, fundamentally have misunderstood stories and narratives because we think about them like a computer does, rather than think about them like an expressive, caring, hateful, fun-loving, sexual, thinking, human being does. Once we overcome our tendency to already reduce and control what a story is (ie. narrative as a set of logical structures, or an audience as a signal station that receives information and translates it), we will have a much deeper understanding of how stories and games, which have been around for tens of thousands of years, lie at the very heart of our nature as human beings.

Please, tell me if this makes any sense to any of you.

Michael’s “Narrative Manifesto” post at the Brainy Gamer gave me an opportunity to think about what’s at stake when we talk about interactive narratives. Although I can only sketch out some of the issues involved, I’d like to take a stab at understanding a few ways we tend to think about interactivity and narratives, and the kinds of assumptions they come with. I hope that I don’t come off too strongly here, but I think we’ve continued to repeat a grave mistake in our understanding of interactivity, and because of that are headed down a blind alley in terms of story development.

The basic premise I have is that the word “interactive” can be understood on at least two levels in video games. We tend to forget that one level of interactivity is more important than the other, often end up in situations where a player fights with the game instead of enjoying it for what it is. Instead of beating our collective heads against the wall as we try to design games that let players live out their wildest desires, we should be developing worlds that encourage players to explore them as living, breathing, places.

When we talk about video games, we typically mean “interactive” when hit a button and the game responds in some way. The player interacts with the game in a way that produces some kind of in-game response. For the last 25 years, this form of interaction has been hailed as the hallmark of computer and video games because other media seem to be less contingent upon the audience’s choices – musical melodies and brush strokes don’t change much when we listen to music or encounter a painting. Since Pong, we’ve relied upon the idea that what is physically on the screen should change whenever the player does something. Player-game interaction is what we typically mean by interactivity. Player choices and decisions are tantamount here, and the game enables the player to accomplish her/his goals.

But doesn’t that seem a bit suspect? Like the first time a cat sees its reflection in a mirror and realizes that it can make its doppelganger do its bidding? Have we been pushing pixels around a screen for 25 years and marveling at the novelty of technology?

In order to answer that, we have to look at a second kind of interactivity. This level of interactivity is one that is found in all aspects of human perception, not just when we play video games. When we talk about engagement we mean that a person is somehow captured, arrested, or even enchanted by something. When we really engage with something, it seems to capture our entire attention. In the most extreme experiences of engagement we sometimes seem to perceive nothing else than the object (or person) of interest – we feel inseparable from the person, place, or thing. A lot of 18th century philosophy tried to get at the idea of perceiving things ‘as they are’ without our personal desires getting in the way.

If you’ve read Michael’s post on the experience of keeping a scorecard at a baseball game (and my comparison to Role-Playing), really engaging with a game means that we put our desires aside and let the game speak to us. Really engaging with a spectated ball game, role-playing a character, reading a book, listening to music, having a conversation, and engaging with fine art, all involve giving ourselves over to the experience and appreciating it for what it is, not our personal desires. Personal engagement is a more primary form of interactivity because it lets the object/person/game express itself to us. Only then can we really personally respond to it and feel something for it. This is a more direct, less masturbatory way of interacting with something.

This is where I think things have gone south of cheese in the way we think about video games. We’ve forgotten that our ability to engage with something is a gift inherent to human perception, and instead we’ve attempted to replace that form of engagement with a derivative technological form of interaction (player-game). When I engage with a game, and really live in that world, everything around me falls aside. The choose-your-own-adventure-esque choices that I make in game mean nothing if I do not already buy into the world as a living, breathing, place, where my choices matter not just to me but the game world itself. When I play Ico, if I don’t invest in the game world I couldn’t possibly care if Yorda is captured by the shadowy figures – she’s just another annoying road block that gets in the way of my immediate goals. 

But when I engage with the world of Ico, I develop a care for what happens in the game, and it’s no longer possible to watch Yorda get pulled into one of the black portals without feeling guilty, or compelled to run over and save her. So inviting players to really engage with a game is the true magic of video games, as it is with novels, films, music, stories, and other media. The magic of engagement, which comes as a result of the author inviting the audience to stay a while, and the audience putting aside their immediate desires, is something that principally cannot be achieved technologically. Or in other words, player-game interaction (the kind of interaction we’re used to in games) only means something when the player is already engaged with the game.

In that way, the idea that we need to develop interactive storytelling algorithms or AI that “react” to the player’s choices in real-time in order to make stories better or more enjoyable, is barking up the wrong tree. Instead of figuring out ways to craft a story on-the-fly (how many times do we need to re-invent Choose-Your-Own-Adventure?), we should be trying to figure out what’s involved in getting players to really engage with the game and build a sense of care for it.

I’m not suggesting that player-game interaction doesn’t matter – it still remains to be an important part of what makes video games a unique medium – I’m instead suggesting that our time needs to be invested in understanding what makes a particular narrative or story compelling for a player. Without that, there is no technological magic pill that will make a story matter for us.

… does this make any sense to anyone else?

Note: head on over to the Vorpal Bunny Ranch for a response from Denis, who has masterfully shown how these issues are expressed in several kinds of games.

In the intervening years, Fallout fans (I among them) have jostled and argued over the fate of their sacred cow. Most fans are deeply concerned that the developer of The Elder Scrolls series (Arena, Daggerfall, Morrowind, Oblivion) will misuse the license and produce a bastard Fallout-Oblivion hybrid unfaithful to the original series.

On the other end, the folks over at Bethesda face the pressure of developing a game that simultaneously satisfies the whims of rabid doomsayers, doubting thomases, FPS fans, hardcore role-players, post-apocalyptos, apathetics, ambivalentés, and Bethsoft believers. After the early fanatical hype and later discord of TES: Oblivion, Bethsoft has a lot to get right this time around the may-pole.

Rather than a simple, Carmackish, “It’s done when it’s done”, the folks over at Bethsoft have been surprisingly candid with their experiences of developing the game, have tried to maintain a positive relationship with the ardent Fallout fan communities, and have pushed hard in the last few months to hit every major online and offline publication with the latest preview of their game.

The hype has been all over the place. People who’ve played it for a few minutes seem to love the graphics and atmosphere. The developers are fanatical about the “VATS” pseudo-turn-based targeting system. FPS lovers are intrigued by the freeform exploration and stunning apocalyptic vistas. Other gamers are up in arms over the same issues: the world looks like Oblivion dipped in mushroom gravy, the gore is gratuitous, VATS is a shoe-horned hack, epic vistas and scenery aren’t the focus of the Fallout universe. Every celebrated feature for one person is a potential disaster for another. The hubbub reminds me of debates that raged when David Fincher’s Alien3 made its debut and forever transformed the face of the Alien series.

Although all aspects of the game seem to be staked out, there are a couple of details that have remained ominously silent in most publications. In this article I take a quick peek at the Writing and Music of the Fallout series, and what it might mean for Fallout 3.

Writing/Dialogue/Story

Although often left neglected, one of the key aspects of the Fallout universe (excepting Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel, which is not a role-playing game) has been the writing quality. The Fallout series shares much with Planescape: Torment, insofar as text-based dialogues that can take minutes and sometimes tens of minutes to explore. Ethical choices and moral predicaments are common to both games, and Fallout does an outstanding job of presenting the player with imaginary temptations. And like Torment, characters are written from the perspective that each “has their own story to tell” and the player is invited to join in on that story and carry it along for a while. At every turn the story feels handcrafted and personal, and encourages the player to continue assisting in telling the story until the end. The Fallout world is one lived-in through its stories.

This stands in sharp contrast to The Elder Scrolls series which has always celebrated a technical-minimalist approach to writing. Dialogues are composed of randomly-generated phrases, characters are generated on-the-spot, and NPCs only tell their stories in order to enable the player to increase statistics, gain items, or pursue combat. In many ways The Elder Scrolls grew out of the “roguelike” school of thought: create enough algorithms and the player has limitless freedom and combat opportunities. Specifically, Daggerfall and Oblivion both suffered from writing that was too generic, too loosely coupled to its universe. Stories just don’t matter a lot for the TES games.

Music

Fallout’s score has often been overlooked, perhaps because of its minimalistic and ambient tenor. Mark Morgan’s composition is atmospheric and often tugs at a sub-conscious experience of the game. Thinking of my first tenuous step into Fallout’s “Necropolis” (ghoul city), Morgan’s score – full of distorted strings and warped buzzing steel saws, was petrifying. The track (listen to it here) is tense and terror-inducing… the musical equivalent of taking a midnight walk down a deserted subway track in zombie territory. At other times Morgan brings a more earthy, tribal tone that hints at a melody but never breaks into it (listen to it here). There is something wonderfully atmospheric about the score in the Fallout series that subliminally cranks up every scene a notch or three without dominating or distracting from it. The music is absolutely central in the game.

Sidenote: If you’ve seen P.T. Anderson’s There Will be Blood, Johnny Greenwood’s score shares much with the scores composed for the original Fallout games (try the “Henry Plainview” track here for a sample).

The Elder Scrolls scores on the other hand have always tried to emulate the modern epic sound – string-heavy, choir-heavy, brass-heavy, and brutally unsubtle (listen here). The scores for Morrowind and Oblivion could have been ripped straight from blockbuster Hollywood grand adventure or fantasy films such as Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings. While technically sufficient and comparable to film scores, the music never quite gives these games an identity. The scores are something tacked on to the game as an afterthought, and bear no constitutive relationship with the gameplay, character interaction, or emotions of a scene. Like the writing, the music is sufficient, generic, and non-intrusive. The music simply doesn’t matter much.

So Where Does That Leave Us?

The last thing that the Fallout universe needs is another opinion on Fallout 3.  While visual art direction, compelling combat, and freeform world exploration are fundamentals of the Fallout series, it disturbs me that other I daresay more important aspects of the game go unmentioned. What I’ve tried to do here is open up the debate on these two aspects with the hope that we can begin to understand why Fallout 3 will be very much unlike Fallout 1 and Fallout 2.

Recently, Michael of the Brainy Gamer wrote a brilliant (yet terribly misunderstood) exploration of the phenomenology of keeping a scorecard at a baseball game. Sounds a little boring eh? You bet… until you understand the level of intimacy that he creates just by writing down a few numbers and thinking through the game. In this post I’ll try to do justice to just what Michael might have meant by the word “engagement” by talking a little bit about what people do when they “engage” themselves with a game. Before you read this, it’s critical to read Michael’s post first… because I’ll be referring to it throughout. Trust me, it’s worth it.

Let’s deal with scorekeeping a baseball game first:

“Scoring a ballgame brings you closer to the game being played on the field”

How is it possible that keeping a score card at a baseball game could actually create a level of intimacy with the game that goes beyond spectating? Isn’t it just a cold calculus of the mind?

From what I can tell, this intimacy is produced in two ways:

1) Through the mechanics of maintaining the scorekeeping card. Michael writes of his experience: “A right-handed batter steps to the plate to face a right-handed pitcher. These two have faced each other many times, so I note that this pitcher “owns” this batter with a mark next to the batter’s name. The flags, which indicated that the wind was blowing out at the start of the game, have now gone limp, so I note that on my scorecard as well.”  From what we gather from his story, keeping the score card requires patience, attentiveness, technical skill, judgment, and a darned good memory. This skillful act, while important (as we’ll find out), is secondary to another personal act…

2) Through the imaginative work of playing the roles of the pitcher, batter, fielders, basemen, etc. This act, as form of engagement with the game, is primary. It involves how we imagine the on-field players are feeling and thinking. As Michael says in a later comment, “If the batter can be patient, he will likely see a good pitch to hit, but if he’s over-anxious, as my scorecard tells me he was both previous times, he’s probably going to be vulnerable to a pitch low and away. He knows this. The pitcher knows this. And so do I.”

Now let’s think about what happens when someone scorekeeps the way he does. The scorekeeper does not just record numbers, statistically analyze them, and spit back out the results. He also does not just imagine the game as a personal fantasy; the game is going on in front of him. He is also not a passive spectator – he feels invested in the game as if his judgments were just as important as the pitcher’s choices.

What the scorekeeper does, and I daresay all people familiar with role-play do, is engage themselves with the game at a level beyond both rule-following and imaginary fantasy. The scorekeeper is like an appreciator of fine art or music: they are mindful of the subtleties and nuances of the ‘rules’ while simultaneously mindful of the art work itself. Where the casual spectator can only engage with the game in fantasy, and the rigid statistician does not “see” a game but a complex calculus, the scorekeeper plays the game. They are engaged with the baseball game at a bodily and spiritual level – the game unfolds for them at their personal pace.

Based on those distinctions we can imagine that there are three (idealized) kinds of video game players:

“The Accountant”

The game is enjoyed at a distance as sets or levels of generative rules. The game is played in terms of understanding these rules and making distinctions, and using this understanding to obtain something of personal interest: in-game artifacts, treasure, quest completion, character attributes, etc.

Because the player has no personal engagement with the rules, the rules are seen as inviolable, impersonal, and external; the player often attempts to master or dominate the game.

“The Devourer”

The game is enjoyed as a flight into fantasy; it is “consumed” by the player because s/he makes no distinctions of quality or quantity within the game. This kind of player simply relies upon their inchoate sense of personal value which determines their play style, and the game is subsumed by their desires. If the game rules do not suit them, they are tossed, ignored, or violated (ie. cheating). The kind of game does not matter much in the end; an FPS could be just as enjoyable as an adventure game as long as it satiates their desires.

“The Role-Player”

The game is understood as deeply personal yet otherworldly. The game world exists as a living, breathing, self-sufficient world, separate from the player’s desires. Yet, the role-player finds ways of discovering his/her desires within the game, by understanding the game’s rules. The player’s desires, in the end, are reshaped by their understanding of the rules. They engage with the game world (usually through a Player-Character or avatar) with a sense of commitment, care, and personal value for what happens in the game. This player plays in the game.

Of course we can see that these player types are idealized, and every player sits in all camps simultaneously, but drawing out the distinctions brings us closer to understanding just what’s at stake for the average player.

Loving Games is Hard Work

Appreciating anything is more than just distilling our personal enjoyment from it, and more than just coldly analyzing its constituent elements one at a time. Appreciating games, art, music, baseball, the subtleties of my cat’s meows, all require a deep personal engagement only possible when we allow ourselves to become mindful of the rules, what’s happening in front of us, and our selves. Developing a phenomenology (a description of our personal engagement with some phenomenon) of video and computer games is one of the new languages that we have to develop, among other things. Understanding and appreciating games allows us to engage with them in deeper waters and ensures that they won’t become just another flavor of the month. I’m deeply thankful that Michael started paddling us down this creek in the first place.

"Video games, particularly the twitch-and-shoot kind, are remarkably passive activities for ones that involve such an increase in heart rate. I wonder what kind of effect that has on us? Do we feel less need to do other activities because, at least chemically, we feel we've already accomplished so much?" [link]

Always with an ironic, yet good-natured, sense of humor, Carrington’s work features some of the most subtle yet recognizably Canadian takes on modern and retro video/computer games. And, with a quick wit and tendency for poetic verse, his writing and speaking both exude a laid-back yet artistic sense. Not bad for a Torontonian!

Although all of his podcasts are worth listening to, I found his retro game reviews especially insightful. Podcast #1 features a review of “Tass Times in Tone Town” – a game that I referred to in “Revitalizing Dead Culture: Why Game History Matters” article, Podcast #2 has an excellent review of the classic Lode Runner, and Podcast #6 features what I think is his best review, of the game Portal. No, not the recently over-hyped game from Valve. Portal is a one-of-a-kind interactive novel that came out in the early 1980s for the PC. In a genre of its own, it’s hard to pigeonhole this excellent story in any particular game genre. Carrington’s review of the game does an amazing job of giving us the feeling of how the game plays – something rarely done in any review I’ve seen. While I don’t want to give away the premise of Portal, it still stands as a beautiful example of how literature itself can become the object of exploration in games. The whole idea of reading an in-game book or listening to a character’s voice logs in order to advance the plot, found in modern games such as System Shock, BioShock, and Mass Effect, was unimaginable before Portal. Unlike these games, however, Portal manages to unfold the storyline only through the player’s discovery of in-game literature and diaries.

So head on over to the 1 MHz Podcast and give it a listen, or check out his latest article on passivity in video gaming.

But does playing these old games matter? Does writing about them matter? What value is there in sweatin' to the oldies? Is it only for reminiscence or nostalgia? In this article I make a few arguments about retro gaming/computing that outline the meaningfulness of tying together the past and the future in the present..

Earlier this week I was listening to the 1 Mhz Apple ][ podcast (which I highly recommend!) and its host, Carrington Vanston, mentioned that his interest in retro computing isn't just for the sake of reminiscing about old stuff or waxing nostalgic about the good ol' days. Rather, Carrington's interest lies in showing how the Apple ][ is a fun, exciting, system that has found new uses in the present. His inaugural episode includes a review of Tass Times in Tonetown – a classic graphical text adventure set in a wacky re-imagining of the 1980s new wave culture. In the review Carrington focuses upon his current-day experience of the game and the ways in which it stands out as something different from the usual fare, such as the inclusion of a feelie newspaper included in the box called “The Tonetown Times” which the player must read to discover the names of characters s/he can talk with in-game.

But why should this matter? Isn’t this just like digging through your old box of hockey cards and marveling at your memory of opening the first pack? Here’s where we get into the nitty-gritty of understanding history.

Understanding what History Means

First, let’s correct a false assumption that often undermines this kind of historical exploration: it does not involve living in the past, it involves living through the past. In history we look at ourselves in the present through the past, and come to understand ourselves as standing in a long genealogy of meaning that pre-exists us. Now that’s a lot to swallow for the modernist who sees him/herself as largely being self-made and sees the past as a sequence of barbaric events that are thankfully left far behind her/him. That kind of modernist philosophy still persists today: we see it in people who cannot understand why Yar’s Revenge, Chrono Trigger or The Faery Tale Adventure are still compelling games. They simply stare blankly at the screen and think to themselves, ‘these graphics sure suck!’.

A corollary of this is that every game we’ve ever played, whether it be Wonder Boy in Monster Land or Mass Effect, all bear some kind of relation to the games, films, novels, poems, myths, paintings and other art media that came before it. Not only do they stand in artistic relation (in terms of the genres, styles, inspirations) but they stand in phenomenal relations. That is, when I say that I “enjoyed” Mass Effect yet “found the gameplay repetitive”, I try to tug at the entire web of language implicit in the meaning of enjoyment or repetition. Put differently: we experience enjoyment and repetitiveness in different ways, depending upon the way we are able to use those words to describe different games. If we’ve only played 10 console games in our lifetime we are going to have a very empty idea of what repetitiveness means, because we’ve only experienced the kind of repetition associated with level-based japanese RPGs. However, the gamer who has played hundreds of games understands that calling Windows Solitaire repetitive is a fundamentally different meaning than calling the battles in every Square-Enix RPG repetitive.

History for Gamers and Game Writers

The current bemoaning of the state of video game reviewing can almost be completely attributed to a problem of language. Reviews are superficial and empty typically because the people who review games typically do not engage themselves with games as standing in a history of meaning. Saying that, “I found the gameplay repetitive” is for all intents and purposes a meaningless statement. If the reviewer says that “the battle scenarios are not unlike the random battles found in all Final Fantasy games prior to XII” we have a fundamentally different meaning, one that breathes life into the doldrums of using the word “repetitive” to describe gameplay.

Now, here’s the big leap that I’d like you to take with me: changing our understanding of words changes our very experience of them. This stands in long relation to the certain forms of philosophy (if you’d like, look up folks like Herder, Goethe, and Charles Taylor). But the point here is that when I make comparisons of repetitiveness between Solitaire and Final Fantasy I actually come to experience the gameplay differently because I can see how each game I play comes to re-shape just what I mean by repetitive. History is about breathing new life into the present and future through the past.

But that’s not possible without actually playing, and writing and talking about, the thousands of games that came before us. Without making the miniscule distinctions between the qualities of the text parser in Tass Times in Tonetown and later Infocom text adventures that on the surface seem petty and redundant, we lose the chance to enrich the language of video/computer games, and in doing so, our experience of modern day gaming!

History Matters for Developers: Any Good Writer is a good reader

I should make one thing clear: understanding history won’t stop anyone from making an unsuccessful game. You can spend your life reading all the works of Shakespeare and still write poetry that nobody reads. But, like a good game, your poetry can be rediscovered decades or even centuries later because it managed to tap into the eternal – the long history of poems, stories and myths that preceded it. Although digital gaming is a medium in its infancy, we can still draw from the deep well of history to fill our games with meaning.

Whether plumbing the depths of The Hobbit on a Sinclair ZX Spectrum or reading Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo a good developer hones her/his craft through immersing her/himself in history. The very idea of playing a game through the eyes of a protagonist, themes of friendship and betrayal, or the story of the journey home, have been around for over a thousand years. The way that these themes were became typified in the great (and not so great!) works of art of human history all bear upon the way that people experience computer and video games now.

The developer, as artist and creator, can only make their creation compelling for an audience by steeping it in a vast ocean of meaning. Without a historical engagement the developer both re-invents the wheel and turns what could have been a deep, compelling work, into a hackneyed consumer product that lasts a week in a gamer’s stomach. The great works, the games that we come back to after 20 years and wonder to ourselves how the game still feels current, are the ones that withstood the test of time because they managed to capture the infinite wisdom of a thousand years of storytelling and poetry on humor, sadness, or friendship – and to a lesser degree at least 30 years of gameplay.

Conclusion

What I tried to suggest here is an alternative to the disappointment that we face when we pick up our dusty copy of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past and find out that the game just isn’t as compelling now as it used to be when we were 12 years old. Nothing can be more traumatic for the gamer than finding out that their favorite game just didn’t grow with them – and if that’s the case it’s even more important to understand why it didn’t grow. If we try to live in the past through our “rose tinted memories” of games we surely can learn nothing new about them, or ourselves.
 

This post is included as part of a Blogs of the Round Table discussion on our ‘favorites’ and ‘least-favorites’ in video games. Follow the below drop-down list for other April ’08 Round Table entries. The list below links to other blogs who participated in this month’s Round Table – I strongly suggesting visiting them.. these articles are all particularly good reads.

“Not being a games designer, Douglas was still thinking linearly,” says Steve [Meretzky]. “As we got more comfortable working together, and I began to assert myself, and Douglas got more familiar with the possibilities of non-linear storytelling, that changed – the majority of the game has the most fiercely non-linear structure of any adventure title I’ve ever worked on.” 

As a followup to friday’s link to Andy Baio’s archeology of Milliway’s (which incidentally made Slashdot), I remembered an excellent article posted in issue #45 of Retro Gamer magazine. Since this is a rather obscure magazine I decided to scan in the entire article because getting back-issues of the U.K. based magazine is rather difficult. You will notice that several of the Infocom folks who contributed to the article also commented on Andy Baio’s page, which gives a sense of interconnectedness to the situation. The article gives a quick look into the creative forces behind the games as well as a sense for the creative environment engendered at the time.

Warning: each page image is over 500kb. It may take you less time to order it from the U.K. than wait for it to download via 28.8k modem.

Page 1 | Page 2 | Page 3 | Page 4

Edit: I forgot to include a link to the publisher’s web site! If you’d like to order a copy of, or subscribe to, Retro Gamer – which comes with my highest recommendations – head on over to Imagine’s eShop to order it online.

design documents, email archives, employee phone numbers, sales figures, internal meeting notes, corporate newsletters, and the source code and game files for every released and unreleased game Infocom made.

So why does this matter? Because he went through the drive and weaved together the tale of why Milliway’s: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe was never completed nor released. If you have not played the excellent Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy IF game (designed and created by Steve Meretzky and Douglas Adams) you’re missing out on a crucial piece of computer game history and a damned fun (difficult!) game. I’ll let Andy tell the story, except for two points:

1. It tells the story of a venerable game company in decline; crisis even. Being 1989, Infocom had already merged with Activision and Milliway’s had been languishing since its inception in ’85. The company closes with not a bang…
2. It comes with a playable prototype of Milliway’s (!!)

Comments from the ex-Infocom folks on the story seem to agree with some of Andy’s story, however it is quite clear that there is more to this than meets the eye. It will be interesting to see what comes of this in the following weeks, as it quite clearly has ruffled a few feathers – and for good reasons.

Thankfully Jason Scott’s new documentary, Get Lamp, is scheduled for release some time this year. I suspect that his own exploration into the world of interactive fiction, complete with interviews of major designers and programmers, should be just as utterly fascinating just as his epic BBS: The Documentary was.

The bearded man in the top-hat leans back and says, “Have a seat. We are discussing the intricacies of Sophocles, Goethe, and Zelda. We call it The Game Cabaret.”

“Why yes. Yes, indeed. In fact, my dear colleague was just commenting on his recent viewing of the motion picture Cabaret and its use of psychological realism. You really must view a celluloid some time – they are quite stimulating!”

Ashamed, you confess that you have not been to viewing of one of those newfangled photographic contraptions yet.

The balding man to your right turns to you and exclaims, “Ah, but then you must try video games! They are quite superior! Why, I was just speaking to my colleagues about repressed homoeroticism in R-Type. I am a reader of Freud, mind you. Care for a cigar?”

At that, the table erupts in laughter.

“My dear colleagues! Let’s not trouble our new friend! Please, have another scotch and join our discussion at your leisure.”

I’ve spent the last few days reading her impressive back-catalogue of posts and while I think all of them are certainly worth your time, her six-part composition on the history of video games stood out for me. These articles demonstrate Keira’s intimate knowledge of retro games, a keen eye for details, and impeccable research skills. For someone born in 1984 (the year of King’s Quest I, Championship Lode Runner, and Seven Cities of Gold) she sure as hell knows her Dune II and Command and Conquer – two games that I spent countless hours playing and subsequently debating about with my junior high school friends. If you’re at all interested in reading a thoughtful piece on the history of video games (and their developers) with some interesting analyses, be sure to read the entire series of articles (start at the bottom).

Edit: Keira posted a reply to the lively ongoing discussion started by Michael over the Brainy Gamer on “photorealism” in video games. I’m hoping to continue the discussion in my next post, and attempt to outline some new ideas on the subject.

A few weeks ago, Michael over at the Brainy Gamer wrote some final thoughts on his play-through of Planescape: Torment, a cRPG that many consider to be one of the best role-playing games to ever hit the PC. The beginning of his post caught my attention right away:

Planescape: Torment is a text-based RPG. True, it manages to squeeze every bit of isometric splendor out of Bioware’s Infinity Engine. And yes, the game occasionally treats you to a pre-rendered cutscene. But these are merely window dressing. Planescape: Torment places all its narrative eggs in one giant 800,000 word basket.

In this article I begin to explore the idea that photorealism in games ultimately detracts from immersion and gives players the feeling that the story and characters are contrived and un-real. I suggest that immersion and dramatic investment aren’t a product of good technologies, they are a product of good artisanship.

There can be no doubt that Michael is right here: Torment is predominantly a text-based RPG. And while I think the art and sound direction play a major role in the way the story is experienced (and should be talked about at some point), the game so heavily relies upon words alone. In major dialogue sequences (note, I didn’t say ‘action sequences’ or ‘cutscenes’), I’ve spent up to 20 minutes exploring the various facets of my character and the NPC I’m talking to through various dialogue choices. This was possibly the first cRPG I’ve played where many NPCs had a greater role than the average bulletin board. Rather than starting the conversation with ‘Hey X, I’m Y – could you retrieve Z for me and I’ll give you N gold?’, many NPCs begin their pleadings with a story. Some NPCs even tell stories (here I refer to the character “Reekwind”) for their own sake: simply to share something to a sympathetic ear. And while it’s obvious that listening to their stories will have some future gameplay benefit (such as gaining experience, or unlocking certain quests), there is something special in Chris Avellone’s writing that captures the imagination and makes us desire more of the stories-within-stories-within-stories.

So how does Torment manage to invite us to the extraordinary world of Planescape? One of the answers (and there are many of course) lies in details of the medium itself. Michael’s later comment, “Imagine a game with the narrative and thematic richness of PST…inside a Mass Effect or Oblivion engine…” caught my interest in that respect. Is that true? Would my experience of Torment have been the same (or better?) through the flashy cinematics and hyper-realism of a new 3D engine? Or – thinking in terms of film – why is Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds original radio drama still superior to the hundreds of millions spent on the modern remake by Steven Spielburg? Was the remake simply a botched job by an acclaimed director, or was there something more endemic to the radio drama itself that grabbed our imaginations by the cojones/ovarios and gave them a good shake?

Here are some of my thoughts in response to Michael’s:

Pictured above: Jim Henson puppet from children’s television series Fraggle Rock.

When I play Mass Effect and Oblivion, I often find myself paying more attention to the technical feats of the 3D engines than the story itself. The first time I experienced this kind of technical distraction was when I watched one of the new Star Wars films. Gone were the Jim Henson puppets and scaled miniatures, and in their place were high-poly renderings of space ships and Jabba the Hutt. The 3D “photorealism” that George Lucas attempted failed miserably for me, and I spent most of my time distracted by imperfections in the animation and the rather stilted ways in which living and non-living characters interacted.

When I play Mass Effect, as say compared to the old Wing Commander computer games, the experience is almost identical. In Wing Commander: Privateer, you spend much of the game exploring and satisfying quest requirements, just as you do in Mass Effect. However, being almost 15 years older, Privateer’s technical feats are humble at best. Instead of the cinematic and high resolution dialogue sequences we see in ME, the dialogues in Privateer consist of random mouth movements and duplicated character art – the bartenders on each planet are physically identical, only wearing different wigs for instance. Despite that (and later I will say ‘because of that’), when my character in Privateer speaks there is something unmistakably *human* about his speech. My expectations of Privateer are lower in terms of realism of course, but as such I become free to focus on what the character means or is feeling and not what s/he is doing, or looks like as s/he is doing it. And similarly, my imagination is freed in the original Star Wars films when I see muppets talking with humans. The muppet is a real character to me – a larger than life human being in its own right, and not just a low budget stand-in for something better. A sock puppet, properly dramatized, is infinitely more ‘human’ than the high-res renders of Aki in Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within.

Why though? That seems totally counterintuitive. Shouldn’t a photorealistic rendering of Jabba the Hutt be more satisfying than a rubber and plastic puppet?

Pictured above: Screenshot of Zork I in the text interpreter. Pictured below: the same scene depicted in Return to Zork Zork Grand Inquisitor.

Here’s where I’d like to speculate a bit: I think part of the reason is due to the complexity of film animations and 3d video games. First, when we look at the first line from the original Zork, “You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door”, we can immediately imagine the scene depicted. When we take that same line and transform it into a 3d representation (as was done in the 3d adventure Return to Zork) little things begin to nag at us because it’s not how we might have imagined it for ourselves. This problem becomes doubly obvious when a director refuses to interpret a text through her/his own imagination, and instead takes a literal reading of the text and transports it to the screen. In my experience, the best interpretations of text rely upon the director’s imagination, and are often quite unlike the original piece.

The second part of the problem comes from the complexity of the medium itself: when a designer chooses translates text from a different medium, they must make some interpretive decisions – the colors in the scene, the character voices, the character models, the lip syncing, etc. If any of those elements draw away from the central focus of the scene we immediately notice because they just don’t fit together well. For instance, take a line of dialogue from Mass Effect – “I don’t care what you want to do. We have to save her!” We can imagine that this scene depicts a fellow comrade requiring our assistance and one of the NPC’s won’t cooperate with us. Take that same line of dialogue and try to design a 3D simulation of it: the lip syncing has to be exact, the voiceover has to be expressive and powerful, and the model’s face has to frown at the exact times as s/he shrieks at the disagreeable NPC. If one little thing is ‘off’ or discordant with the performance (ie. if the character’s arms lay dead at his/her side as s/he tries to express anger), the scene deflates and we feel like we’re watching computers generated models interact, and not riveting drama. In Torment and other text-based games, problems of expression are less focal because our focus is purely on the text itself. Text adventurers must simply use their imaginations to ‘see through’ the text to a story, drama, or puzzle, instead of analyzing a thousand different elements interact simultaneously. Therefore, as a text-based RPG Torment predominantly relies upon the imagination of the reader-player and, in my opinion, is a better game for it. If Torment were remade with the Mass Effect 3D engine, we’d have a completely different gaming experience: subtlety is so hard to express when you’re trying to control everything in a scene like a puppet master with a thousand fingers. Computer games, especially those using 3D engines, present the artistic director with an inherently complicated system to express his/her ideas.

Pictured above: What happens when you take a good movie, and mix it with bad photorealistic CG models.

But that’s only half of the story. If the artistic difficulties associated with photorealism were just about handling technical complexity the solution would be easy: just make computers faster and integrate more AI routines. But that’s missing the point. The real problem with photorealism is photorealism itself. As I alluded to earlier, there is something inherent in a dramatic performance, a good piece of art, a piece of well-written dialogue, that draws an emotional response from us. Like in live theatre and radio drama, the exaggerated drama of a muppet can somehow draw me into the character far more than the ‘realism’ of a computer-generated model. But what is that artistic process, and how might it be adapted for video games? Those are questions I don’t have answers to yet, but I suspect that part of the answer lies in allowing players to focus on what matters (the story, the gameplay, the environment, etc) and allowing the rest of the game to be filled in by the player’s imagination.