Philosophy

One of my guilty pleasures is in retro gaming and retro computing. My basement storage room is filled with arcane devices and hundreds of games: a venerable Commodore 64, an Apple ][e rescued from a garage sale, a local family’s Apple ][gs that was donated to me, a MAME arcade cabinet, a Mattel Intellivision II - the list goes on indefinitely. I just can’t bear to see these things tossed out. Lately I’ve found myself playing Ultima VII: Serpent Isle on my 486 DX2/66 (now with a Roland MT-32!), and my 360 has sat untended for months.

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..

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Pictured above: Concept art drawn by Rah-Bop. Artwork found in The Endless Forest forums.

When I logged into The Endless Forest, the first thing I did was fiddle with the controls. I walked my fawn around in circles. I had it rub its side against a tree, and eat some purple flowers. I visited an ancient stone shrine that made my fawn’s head glow after kneeling before it for a minute, and visited the ruins of a cemetery. It was serene, but lonely.

Then I logged out, slightly frustrated. I was worried that I had missed something crucial… a cleverly hidden gameplay mechanic, a story-line or introduction that failed to get trigged… some kind of point to the game!

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Pictured above: Illustration from William Blake’s Gates of Paradise.

I recently came across a post over at Jeff Tunnell’s blog that reminds game designers how important it is to have many design ideas in mind, rather than just relying on a single idea. It made me think about one of the central problems in modern mainstream game development: a lack of fresh, innovative games. As I was writing this article, GameSetWatch posted footage from the Independent Games Summit of an “Innovation in Independent Games” panel consisting of Jenova Chen, Jonathan Mak, Kyle Gabler, and Jonathan Blow. After listening to the hour-long discussion, I decided to integrate many of the comments into this article, because they were inherently relevant and profound for any discussion of the creative process.

While many people assume that independent game developers, by virtue of being unconstrained by publishers, auto-magically have creative, interesting ideas. However, as I hope to demonstrate - creative innovation is far from guaranteed simply because we’re ‘indies’, and requires a certain kind of developer or team to come up with something worth playing.

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Above: How many times did you see this screen when you last played Fallout?

Throughout the summer there was an interesting thread in the Mobygames forums on the subject of ‘death’ in video games, in response to an article written for The Guardian. The general feeling among players questions the importance of death in games, and why it remains to be such a central part of the medium. I wasn’t satisfied with The Guardian’s article which doesn’t penetrate the issue very deeply, so I thought I’d take a stab at the notion of what death ‘means’ in gaming, and how (as designers) we might start to re-think the rather hackneyed game mechanic and come up with slightly more novel ways of making deaths meaningful for players.

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I don’t want to turn into one of those people that does nothing else but link out to other sites for news… I’m looking at you TIGsource! … but Jason over at Arthouse Games just posted a retro game review of Paradroid worth reading. Read his review first, then continue here for my comments on it…

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This afternoon I had the pleasure of discovering the site Arthouse Games where Jason Rohrer takes on the challenge of exploring the more indie, artistic aspects of gaming. I like his approach .. it’s thoughtful, and his interviews usually hint at some amount of depth in the way he thinks about what artful games can mean. So, why did I bring that up?

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