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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Response to Heavy Rain So Far

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

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

The Problem

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Solution?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Imagining Makes it Real

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

www.youtube.com/watch?v=vloYvK2sK1g

A Brief Tour of the Game

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

TJ&E’s Unique, Funky, Style

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

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

A Perfect Expression of Co-Operative Play

Jason Moses writes,

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

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

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

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

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

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

Note: My thanks to Mobygames for supplying the screenshots.

In this article I try to plead a case against ”good” interface design. Rather, I would like to see interfaces that frustrate the gamer and encourage them to explore the game’s world creatively, rather than instrumentally.

Here are some of the interface design goals that Matthew suggests:

1. Visibility: It Should Be Obvious What a Control Is Used For.
   If I press this button, what will happen? If I want to unlock the door, which control should I use? A system with good visibility allows the user to easily translate goals into actions.
2. Affordance: It Should Be Obvious How a Control Is Used.
   The system should provide “strong clues to the operation of things”. A button affords pushing, a lever affords pulling, etc. The user should know how to operate a control just by looking at it.
3. Feedback: It Should Be Obvious When a Control Has Been Used.
   Once the user has pressed a button, the system should react in a manner that clearly communicates what has just been accomplished. If nothing has happened, this fact should also be obvious.

Each of these design principles is sensible precisely because they are grounded in the way of life we already live: we have goals (or are given goals by the designer), we encounter objects in the world, we use those objects to achieve those goals, we receive feedback when we engage in them. Almost all games that we’ve played are based on this very rational structure.

Instrumental reason in video games

But to get a little philosophical here, all of these principles are based on an instrumental relation to video games. It’s an instrumental view insofar as the world is seen as a collection of things, and the gamer is an organism with clearly specified goals. In order to achieve those goals, s/he must use those things in the correct way. The fact that we call our HIDs “controllers” now instead of a “joysticks” is very indicative of the culture we live in: we tend to believe that games are there to satisfy goals.

But are games tools or instruments? This is the problem I have with Donald Norman’s usability studies: they are all based on an instrumentalist view of the world. If you aren’t playing by the rules that the designer has created, you aren’t doing it right. So the designer is encouraged to make the game’s goals and controls as transparent as possible, so gamers can satisfy quests/goals/rules as efficiently as possible.

But what about play? When we play games, are we trying to satisfy our instrumental goals? Perhaps vaguely. A friend and I used to play Midtown Madness together, and try to cause horrible traffic jams at one side of town, so we could race our car down the highway and hit the jam at the highest possible speed. Sometimes the car would catch an edge of a bumper and launch over the other cars in the jam – kudos would be awarded for the most spectacular collision. We were not playing the game according to the rules – we were trying to break the rules and create new possibilities within the constraints of the game.

Making a case for ‘broken’ interfaces

If you’re designing a new hammer or building a sports car, you want the ‘interface’ (the usability) to be predictable, reliable, and intuitive. You don’t want the hammer dancing around the nail, nor do you want your new sports car choosing a random direction every time you turn left.

But when we make video games, we should not be engineering for usability. A game is not a utility. It is an imaginative space and a play space. Creating “user-friendly” video games is another way of saying, “We are making a faster, better, hammer, that practically anyone can use!” What we need instead, I think, is a game that frustrates us. A game where learning the rules of play – whatever they are – is an exploration in itself. We don’t need to learn the rules first, then learn how to play. We play a game, and learn the bounds of the space as we do it.

Iroquois Pliskin (understandably) argues that Resident Evil 5 suffers from ”bad interface design” that prevents the player from moving forwards in the game. In my view, this has the potential to be a wonderful opportunity for play. Unfortunately, RE5 is just as instrumentally-minded as most gamers are, and only one “solution” to the “puzzle” is the “right” one. Creativity and play do not imagine specific ends such as these. So instead of making RE5′s interface more intuitive, easy-to-play, or straightforward, I’d like to see the game enable creative solutions to its very difficult challenges.

Sure, instrumental reason satisfies our desire for achievement and consumption… but it fundamentally denies other desires we have, such as the desire to play, think creatively, and undermine the rules. I’d like to see some badly designed interfaces that leave lots of cracks in the pavement – spaces for the imagination. A game is not a hammer.

Thank you to (fellow Canuck!) Matthew Gallant and Iroquois Pliskin for their thoughts on game interfaces.

Note: Nels Anderson, who lives dangerously near the 49th parallel, has some interesting thoughts on design/UI issues that are directly pertinent to this discussion here and here… his thoughts fall closer to Matthew Gallant’s reading of Donald Norman’s book than mine do, but they offer an articulate interpretation of game mechanics and interactivity.

As the game loaded, Jeff said, “This is gonna be the biggest game of the year.”

He cranked up the speakers and blared metal synth midi music; the rest of the family in the other room yelled at us to keep it down. KABOOM! The first panicked shot from the shotgun exploded snargling imps into giblets.

“Over to your right! It’s coming! SHOOT!” we shrieked as another imp advanced on Jeff.

We had never played anything so fast before… all of us broke into a nervous sweat as the man in the hotseat explored the rest of the level. For the first time in our collected lives, we experienced terror playing a computer game.

My uncle picked up the phone and dialed the 1-800 number listed on the exit screen to purchase us a registered copy of the game. We had to have it.

Fast-forward over 16 years.

Yesterday, John Romero edited and posted a video of a trip that Dan Linton (sysop of The Software Creations BBS) took to id Software way back in 1993. The video features composer Bobby Prince giving a demo of some of his work (ie. Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3-D, etc), and John Romero playing an early version of Doom.

What I like the most about the video is that the folks over at id show so much passion and energy for their work. They love what they do, and they’re having fun doing it. There is something very familiar about watch Romero play Doom, as his friends and co-workers crowd around the monitor and express their enthusiasm. That kind of excitement and communal gawking is something I sorely miss now that games have become a much more individualized form of entertainment.

I highly recommend checking out the video for a blast to the past, even if you weren’t a Doom fan.

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.

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

Joe writes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Evolve, Experiment, Enlighten, Explore, but…

Never forget your roots.

Joe and Paula Garrity
Curators of The Origin Museum

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

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

- Joe Garrity
Curator, The Origin Museum

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

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

From stunning concept painting…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Note: Wing Commander II images courtesy of WCNews.com

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

- Joe Garrity
Curator, The Origin Museum.

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

www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfAoVX_VWWs

This is one of those projects that I love to keep up with, because like many fan-based projects it’s kept running purely by the collective steam of its dedicated crew and fans. Last year “The Food Sucks” team managed to get the impressive Ultima VII: The Black Gate running on the older PSP ‘phat’ using the Exult game engine.

A week ago, the team announced that both The Black Gate and its sequel Serpent Isle are now both playable on the PSP Slim! According to the comments section of their page, load times have improved and the game runs solidly on the Slim. It looks like there will be a patch coming soon because Phat owners have been experiencing some random crashes with the new release, but that shouldn’t stop you from giving it a go. Given that Ultima VII: The Black Gate, and Ultima VII: Serpent Isle are renown high points of RPG history, I highly suggest giving it a go. If you don’t have a PSP, you can always head over to the Exult game engine page and download a package for one of many operating systems.

Part of those feelings can be chalked up to old fashioned nostalgia – it’s hard to give up fond memories of gingerly tearing the plastic off of a brand new game as a kid, reveling in the pungent odor of freshly printed manuals and carefully unfurling cloth maps of lands a’far. Closely linked to that is another aspect of physical packaging that I think is really important, and we’ve forgotten it in our unquestioned haste to deliver games cheaper and faster. That is, we’ve lost our appreciation of the game packaging as a craft and an art unto itself that provides a tactile engagement with games we otherwise lack.

The chronology of game packaging that Ryan Scott and Scott Sharkey present in their article Shrink Wrapped: A history of PC game packaging trends, from awesome to awful, is a good taste of how packaging progressed from the early years to the present. Unfortunately, a chronology is just that – it doesn’t bring to the forefront why packaging matters might matter so much to us. In this article I do my best to highlight one game with interesting game packaging – feelies, artwork, manuals, etc – and try to show how (for some people) physical interaction with the packaging can transform the nature of the game.  I should note that some of the things I say later in the article could be construed as spoilers, so ye have been warned!

Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar

As far as I know, this is the first (and perhaps only) game to integrate the in-box materials into the game’s introduction. Written in the first-person, the introduction invites the player into the game world and encourages the player to explore the trinkets in the box… the player finds the metal ankh that falls from the moongate, a book titled The History of Britannia as told by Kyle the Younger, a second book titled in undecipherable runes (The Book of Mystic Wisdom), and a cloth map. Stepping out of character for a moment, the narrator cautions the player to avoid reading The Book of Mystic Wisdom and alternatively instructs the player to read The History of Britannia: “Settling back under the willow tree, you open the book. You read the Book of History. (No, really! Read the Book of History!)” 

As I play Ultima IV, I’m pulled directly into the story. I’m introduced to The Book of History and the ankh as discoveries that I’ve made, and not simply marketing pack-ins unceremoniously mass-produced in some factory. The introduction transforms these objects magically – they become sacred artifacts that can’t be ignored or tossed out. It is because of these artifacts that as a player I don’t simply play along and temporarily assume the role of another anonymous Avatar who becomes the fantasied saviour of Britannia. The world of Britannia now matters to me – it’s a living, breathing, place where books of history, ankh necklaces, and brightly colored maps are crafted… a place away from the mundane vagaries of daily life… it is a sacred place, far away from home. The in-box materials, as far as the persuaded player is concerned, were minted in a fantastical far away land that lies just on the other side of a magical door.

But why does this magical transformation of the world matter so much for Ultima IV? Couldn’t the player be just as satisfied with playing-the-hero-role for a few hours and move on to the next game on the pile, as we normally do when we consume games?

This is where Ultima IV takes an ogre-sized step away from the usual fare. As the player reads The History of Britannia s/he becomes immersed in the world as a newcomer or traveller – like reading a ‘Lonely Planet Guide’ in anticipation of an adventure into unknown lands. After chronicling the history of Britannia and describing its various sights, forms of magic, creatures and beasts, and versing the player in combat techniques, Kyle the Younger poses a question (and quest!) to the player: is it possible to become a virtuous person, and if so, what paths must s/he walk in order to become this teacher of virtue? The historian points the player to speak with Lord British, who responds on the last page of the manual:

The Quest of the Avatar is the search for a new standard, a new vision of life for which our people may strive. We seek the person who can become a shining example for our nation and guide us from the Age of Darkeness into the Age of Light…

… The secrets of the Avatar [the embodiment of virtue] are buried deep in the hearts of both our people and the land in which we dwell. The search will be arduous and the One who shall succeed must be able to assemble all the parts of the great mystery in order to solve the Quest.

Gaze upon the device portrayed on the facing page of this tome. Learn it well, for when thou dost gaze upon it again then shall thy life’s quest be revealed.

To which, the player is presented with an arcane symbol – later discovered to be the symbol for the “Codex of Ultimate Wisdom”. Players who, in their haste or their gluttony for gameplay, skipped this section of the manual are plunged into a game of traditional fighting and gold- and item-hoarding. While they will no doubt stumble upon many sub-quests that converge upon the game’s ending, their choices in the game won’t be motivated by Lord British’s adherence to the eight paths of virtue. Because players (including myself) typically are motivated by symbolic self-gratification, the game is loaded with ethical-moral traps that tempt the player into acting on their vices. All acts, whether virtuous or not, are recorded behind the scenes – and the player is never given an unambiguous measure of where they stand with the eight virtues – the player literally must be mindful of their virtuousness themselves! If players act greedily, selfishly, dishonorably, cowardly, etc, without recognizing it – they will never become the Avatar. Thus, the player must remain mindful throughout the game of their actions, and always remain faithful to the path of virtue. To use an infamous example, all of the herbalists in the game are blind. When purchasing magical reagents if the player palms off 4 coins instead of 10 coins to the blind herbalist, the herbalist quietly accepts the coins without question. However, later on the player might discover that they are not Honest enough to become the Avatar… and never see the end of the game.

The manual motivates the player to look at things in a certain way – it suggests to us to rely upon whatever understanding of Honesty, Compassion, Spirituality, Sacrifice, Honor, Humility, Love, Valor, and Justice we might have, and play the game with all of those things in mind. And as we play the game in terms of the virtues, we begin to get a better sense for them – we start to see what kinds of acts are virtuous and what kinds are not. And to motivate these virtuous acts that play against our childish egocentrism we pursue the secret of that circular symbol in the back of the manual – what the hell is that thing?

The end of the game, which is famously among the handful of game endings with no violent defeat of some alien foe, a voice asks the player a series of 8 questions – each of which involving the virtues. As the player answers each question correctly, the game draws a single feature on the screen – a line or a circle. If the player knows her/his virtues, the complex Codex Symbol is drawn on the screen. Finally, the voice asks the player a final question – which I will not repeat here – and returns the player to the circle of stones at the outset of the game – home.

Note: If you’d really like to watch the ending, click here.

All of these in-game interactions are completely possible without the in-box artifacts. However, without the artifacts the game is a third-person experience: once the computer is shut off the virtues are just some romantic quest in a computer-generated reality. The player learns nothing from the experience, and the game exists as a kind of wish-fulfilling fantasy.

But the in-box artifacts do just the opposite: they act as a bridge between the player’s real-world and Britannia – they allow the player to act as her/himself, meaning that their in-game actions are integrated in the self whether they recognize it or not, and their way of thinking virtuously doesn’t disappear when the computer is shut down. Ultima IV, in many ways, is one of the first computer games to offer a true role-playing experience. Without the in-box artifacts and the player’s attention to them, the game offers no transformative experience.

The Future

Our tacit attachment to in-box artifacts is thus something deeper than nostalgia for games that use the artifacts as active parts of the game. Artifacts don’t just draw players into the game world – they also draw the game world into the player’s life.

In a world where mass-consumption has become the norm, it’s sad to see that games are quickly following suit. Viewing a PDF on a monitor isn’t the same as cracking opening a leather-bound manual. Hitting ‘M’ to view an in-game map isn’t the same experience as unfurling a cloth map and wondering at the various continents. Yes, several games like TES: Oblivion and Fallout 3 offer ‘collector’s edition’ packages that have all sorts of trinkets in them – but none of them feel as if they really belong to the game because the game is not integrated with the trinkets. Ultima IV, among other games such as Wasteland, Tass Times in Tonetown, and Space Quest IV, make what were toys or trinkets matter to us and turn them into physical artifacts that express the game world.

What I’m trying to say here is that whether a mass-market game is digital-download-only, or if the game is released as a trinket-packed collector’s edition, the options don’t matter anymore: in-box materials no longer mean anything because developers have forgotten their personal, meaningful, value. Developers no longer recognize the way that artifact and game constitute one another. They’re called “collector’s editions” for a reason – they’re made for people who like to collect things.

I look forward to the day that developers hearken back to games like Ultima IV and remind players that games are about their lives, and not just another thing to be consumed.

Thankfully, EA did not toss out decades worth of artifacts, source code, artwork, design documents, and other archivists treasures that the folks at Origin produced. Months ago, the people over at the Wing Commander News site discovered that several boxes of Origin artifacts were shipped to EA Mythic, and quickly got to work on getting permission to archive all of the materials. All of that work paid off, when the team of dedicated archivists spent a week at Mythic photographing, digitizing, and copying, the tons of materials left from the Origin days.

Joe had this to say about the trip:

I just wanted to drop you a line to let you know some details on the trip to  EA’s Origin archive at Mythic Entertainment.  We spent a week going thru the last of Origin’s old holdings, and have sucessfully archived an enormous amount of data, including: 

CD Images: 708 
SyQuest Images: 25 
Photographs: 3,390 
3.5″ Disks: 274 
Optical Discs: 2 
DAT Tapes: 36 
8mm Tape Images: 8 
Scans: 8,225 
VHS Tapes: 101 

The trip was a total success, with the recovery/documentation of some truly rare artifacts.  The guys running Mythic were incredibly supportive and they treated us all like true professionals. We all got to live our childhood game developer fantasies and work with Origin data for twelve hours a day for a week — it was an incredible experience. 

There was a total of just under 1 Terabyte of data that we recovered, in the form of ISO files and photographs.  Technically, we don’t know specifically what we have yet, but I’ve seen box layouts, advertising proofs, video interviews, original artwork pieces, award trophies, design documents, budgets for live action film shoots… absolutely fascinating material for anyone interested in how these games were made. 

Some highlights of what was recovered: 
* Artwork from the unreleased Privateer 3 
* Possible data from several unreleased games (Bioforge Plus, Technosaur, Ultima IX source code–Lost Vale was not specifically listed on any data labels, but there was a tape called U8-project archive)
* Detailed photographs of the *head* of Prince Thrakath (Wing Commander 3) 
* Over 20 design docs for various Wing Commander, UO and UO2 projects 
* videos of interviews w/Mark Hammil, Richard Garriott, Star Long, and others 

There will be more discoveries made, as we catalogue all of the data. 

The “official” word from Mythic’s office manager is that we need to vett everything before handing out data… but then their producer who arranged all his, Paul Barnett, has said he wants to see it preserved and available for people quickly–perhaps this may get to users hands!. 

If you want to read more, and see some photos of the expedition, check out this photo diary of the experience. You might also want to check out some of the sexy, high resolution images of Privateer 3 taken from the archive, also available at WCNews.com. Thank you to the hard-working archivists and Mythic employees that made this possible. I’d personally love to play BioForge Plus, or work with the Ultima IX source code some day.

This article is part of a new series of articles that I call “Treasures from the Tickle Trunk” where I pull a game from my basement game library and take a deeper look at what it achieves. This style of article is deeply influenced by Corvus’s Narrative of the Moment series.

As I played through the demo of Penny Arcade Adventures this morning, I kept reminding myself that writing comedy is difficult – and writing interactive comedy well is nigh impossible. Not only is quick wit, rich satire, and goofy slapstick necessary, but it has to be reflected in gameplay in such a way as to play funny. With so few adventure games, and even fewer games with a sense of humor, I thought I would take a fresh look at one of the bright highlights of gaming humor in the 90s – Day of the Tentacle.

Drawing upon the strange, quirky, world of its predecessor, Maniac Mansion, the first minute of DoTT sets the tone for the rest of the game. The game is an excellent example of how every element of a game can be integrated into a holistic theme.

Visual Art

The most striking aspect of DoTT is the bizarre and striking artwork found throughout the game. If you’re familiar with the German Expressionist film movement, you may recognize the kinship between the artistic style of DoTT and films such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Instead of the generic 2D perspective view common to most adventure games of that era, the backgrounds are lavishly painted in a tilted, helter-skelter fashion: walls curve into one another, objects lean at impossible angles, characters are illustrated as distorted figures. Unlike German Expressionism however, DoTT combines this illustrative style with a saturated palette of bright purples, greens, and blues.  The artwork, both foreground and background, shrieks of goofy and lighthearted yet sincere zaniness. The game is similarly animated: Bernard struts around with his pants pulled up to his chest and feet far in front of him, Laverne’s neck stretches to impossible lengths in the introduction, and Dr. Fred wrings his hands outrageously in every scene. Nothing in the game is unembellished, and most things are exaggerated to a ridiculous degree.

Music and Sound

Although less exaggerated than the visual art, the music still retains the goofiness of the game. Thanks to the iMUSE system, every piece of music in the game is synchronized and arranged on the fly according to the mood of the scene or specific event. In terms of musical style the game relies upon wind instruments throughout; very few percussion and string instrument pieces are found. The wind instruments – mostly flutes, clarinets, and tubas – give the game a light atmosphere punctuated by the occasional slapstick tuba honk. Although less aggressive in its strength, the music is in many ways reminiscent of the Looney Tunes cartoon musical scores – every scene is arranged to fit the particular scene. In scenes where the character is surprised by something, we are greeted with the familiar and hackneyed da-da-daaaaah! of daytime soap operas or B-grade horror flicks that only serves to make the scene even more outrageous and fun.

The sounds in the game accomplish the same feat: Bernard picking his ear wax makes the sound of two balloons squishing against each other, picking up objects gives the player a yoink! or swipe! feedback sound; the introduction to the game gives a good overall survey of the theme. But unlike the great majority of games that rely upon the same kinds of sound libraries, the most cliched sound effects are put to perfect use in this game because they are so overused and ridiculous. 

The characters in the game are not only voiced convincingly, but the voices always suit their character illustrations in uncanny ways. Bernard is voiced by the somewhat unknown, but excellent, Richard Sanders who played ‘Les Nessman’ on the American sitcom WKRP in Cincinnati. Bernard’s voice is so thickly nerdy that at times Sanders manages to capture in his acting what I think is the quintessential nerd: long periods of whining interrupted by brief, pathetic, moments of bravery.

Story/Narrative

What could be more bizarre than a twisted Scooby Doo troupe bumbling their way through a search for a crazed purple tentacle bent on taking over the world? Apparently this: by sending them all through portable toilets fashioned into time machines to the past, only to have them end up in different time periods because the crazy professor was too cheap to pay for a real diamond to power the Chron-O-Johns!

Hoagie is trapped in pre-confederation America, Bernard in the present, and Laverne in a disturbing purple-tentacle-controlled mockery of the future. By satirizing each period the game does an admirable job of presenting its own twisted look at history: Hoagie for instance spends his time interacting with American colonialists like George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and John Hancock, each of which are thickly stylized personalities. Although the characters are lampooned mercilessly, they all manage to retain their signature styles and contribute to a hilarious and surprisingly educational American conferedation history lesson.

In truth the story theme is itself nothing new (mad scientific experiment goes wrong, threatens world, kids save world), but what makes it so compelling is the sheer oddity of the characters and world, and the sense of humor they constitute together. The story is one long schtick that always stays safely on the side of witty and good-natured, and never makes excursions into senseless violence or needless sarcasm. Because the story and gameplay are so well integrated with one another, both compel the player to keep playing.

Gameplay

As I mentioned in the introduction, finding ways of making gameplay goofy often borders on impossible. Because games depend upon repeatable, predictable, and logical rule systems, making games that operate on a twisted logic and play well is rare. Although DoTT does nothing new in terms of its inventory system and point’n'click verb interface, both are put to new uses thanks to an interesting world and puzzles. Instead of commanding just one protagonist, the player can switch between three protagonists throughout the game: Bernard, Laverne, and Hoagie. Each character has their own distinct personality and will or will not do certain kinds of tasks – Hoagie is hideously lazy, Laverne is not altogether bright, and Bernard is downright clumsy. Since each character is trapped in a different time period, certain puzzles can only be completed by “flushing” items down the Chron-O-John to another time period. Many items are combinable and often in strange and bizarre ways, which many times left me baffled as to how to complete the puzzle. However that is not to say that the puzzles are irrational – the player must simply learn to immerse her/himself in the wacky logic of DoTT. For instance, a great amount of the game is spent changing things in one time period in order to effect changes in future periods; the game does an admirable job of making the most seemingly insignificant change in one period change the entire game. As Chris Remo of Adventure Gamers puts it, “Indeed, the story of the game and the gameplay itself are deftly intertwined. Almost without exception, the puzzles tie directly into the plot, rather than existing on a separate plane.”

Conclusion

Although this game has been reviewed a countless number of times, given the recent releases of Penny Arcade Adventures and Telltale’s Sam and Max episodes, I felt it was important to remind myself that the humor in these games was eclipsed over 10 years ago by a true modern adventure-humor classic. I could have written this same article about Sam and Max Hit the Road (which has a completely different style of humor) but I felt that Day of the Tentacle is unmatched in its synthesis of humor, story, and world. Game designers and writers do not need to write or design anything funny - they need to make worlds and characters that in themselves are compelling and hilarious – the jokes come as a natural consequence of that after the fact.

Thanks to the excellent ScummVM project, you can play Day of the Tentacle in Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, etc. I highly recommend playing the CD “talkie” version with full voiceovers.

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.