“Lend me your wings, bird. I’ll spread them and fly on the thermals.” – Stephen King, The Gunslinger

“Nothing can match the treasure of common memories, of trials endured together, of quarrels and reconciliations and generous emotions. It is idle, having planted an acorn in the morning, to expect that afternoon to sit in the shade of the oak.” – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars

When I first stepped out delicately into the dune, my foot sunk in past my ankles. This was not the hardscrabble of a wind-raked wasteland, nor the moist bleached sand of coral beaches. It was the sand that Frank Herbert imagined in Dune, and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry recollected in his Wind, Sand and Stars. The kind of sand that welcomes your toes in, a finely sifted sugar.

The Elementary Particles 0f Emotion

What makes Journey stand apart from other games that have made the natural environment central to the experience (i.e. Fallout 3, S.T.A.L.K.E.R., the Mass Effect series) are the ways in which rich colours, luscious landscapes and pliable terrain serve to ground the player’s feelings. Thatgamecompany’s attention to the landscape comes as no surprise – both Flower and Cloud invite the player to delight in repainting and reshaping the earth and sky, turning a drab scene into a visual and audial bouquet. But, like Flower, not all of the environments are cheerful and bright… Journey makes room for the industrial, the cold, and the ominous. But in each landscape, whether carried into the sky by the strong and dry simooms that whoosh through the hot desert, or struggling against the bitter katabatic winds that rush down from the mountain peaks and flatten me to the ground, each kind of experience is tightly wound around a cluster of feelings. Warm, flight, playful. Cold, march, laborious. Each element, earth, sky, water, and fire, express the elementary nature of our feelings by showing how the terrestrial comforts of the sand are inexorably intertwined with the joyful airiness of the sky. We need both lightness and heaviness, and warmth and cold, to be complete human beings.

A Different Understanding of Multiplayer

But, as many have pointed out, the game offers a new kind of multi-player experience. When I explore the landscape, I inevitably run into other people. At times, Journey randomly selects one other PSN player and injects them into the same landscape as I, and we are free to explore the lands together (or not). By whittling communication down to the expressive cry – a single musical morpheme – players can ‘sing’ to one another. As I run and fly through the lands with my anonymous play partner, I cannot contain the peculiar smile that erupts on my face: we are managing to communicate with one another using the primordial languages of human and animal expression alike… singing, dancing, gesturing, and gliding like whirling dervishes. The Endless Forest is the only game that offers a comparable kind of experience.

If Journey is poetry-prose that explores the long march from childhood to death through the four elements, then Thatgamecompany has managed to dig deeper into truly human existence than any other game I can think of. Sure, Journey can be broken down into game mechanics, architecture, plot elements and characters, but ultimately the experience it offers involve primeval feelings, and those who will inexorably analyze the game will miss the point. Games like Journey beckon gamers towards a deeper appreciation for what is basic to human life; I hope invites developers and game writers to work towards understanding gaming as an inherently human experience.

Update: Jamie Love has written the article that I wish I had written about Journey in the first place, over at GameSugar. It partners well with mine, and focuses on different aspects of the game that I wish I had. Go check it out.

I’m walking down a long hallway in The Citadel, and I’m waved over by reporter Emily Wong. She wants some information on a local crime lord, and I’ve got some data on the guy that would give her a scoop. I hesitate at first, unsure of her motivations, but I eventually give in and I’m rewarded handsomely for the data. Not only does she transfer some credits my way, but I (Commander Shepherd) agree to giving her some juicy exclusive interviews. These interviews will put my name on the galactic map. Sweet.

Sadly, we face an almost identical ethical problem in the indie games industry, as I do in Mass Effect.

Diogo Ribeiro’s excellent article The “Indie” Challenge, if you have not read it already, presents an excellent overview of the challenges independent developers face when trying to get their games into players’ hands. Diogo singles out the all-too-cozy relationship between AAA developers, publishers and the writers/editors of large gaming networks, as a serious barrier for indie developers getting their games promoted. The article tugs at a lot of issues dear to us gamers and writers: the ‘us and them’ attitude that pervades ‘indie vs. mainstream’ industries, the ethics of game promotion and reviewing, and the perception of indie games as rarely something more than time wasting devices.

As an outsider to the games industry and journalism, I really appreciate Diogo’s strong insider knowledge of those domains. There is a lot of good information here for the indie seeking to get their newest creation out into the market:

Your first email to either should avoid looking like a typical press release. Don’t bother with terms like “cutting edge” – you’re supposed to be talking about games, not fax paper. Focus on the strengths of your game. If it sports a concept never seen before in videogames – a very rare thing, mind you – extol those virtues. If it uses traditional play mechanics with a novel twist, don’t be shy about making comparisons. “All the action of Gears of War with the ovine satisfaction of Sheep!”….

Obviously, this is critical for people trying to make a living out of game development, and I agree with everything he has to say here. But I see an extreme danger in this promotion-driven approach to game development. Herein lies the great danger:

Introversion is a case study for several reasons, but to me the most important one is they cared about one thing that most indie devs don’t – they gave as much emphasis on promoting themselves as they did creating their game. Why aren’t you doing the same, indies?

Is it true that indie developers should be spending as much time on promoting themselves as they did in creating their game? Of course there are obvious financial benefits to heavily promoting your indie game, but what kinds of costs come with a promotion-heavy approach?

Indie Ethics

The indie world depends very much upon the goodwill, honesty and free time of people who have very little financial benefit from reviewing or promoting your game. I have never received a penny from Rastek (Wither), Jenova Chen (Flower), Markus Persson (Minecraft), Anthony Flack (Cletus Clay), or Michael Samyn and Auriea Harvey (The Endless Forest). None of these people asked me to write about their games. I chose to write about these little games (some of which became big games) because they were not promoted, because they were unknown, and because these creations impressed me completely on their own terms. When I get a request to review/promote a game, even if it is heartfelt and personal, my interest immediately sinks. People like me who write about games are not interested in being used as extensions of the advertising industry; asking me to promote your game is a very good way of alienating me from your creation. Real writers are their own source of inspiration; they don’t need your one-liner press kits.

There is another ethical consideration at play here. Diogo mentions fellow Canadian Phil Fish, whose game recently won a major award at the 2012 Independent Games Festival. Diogo writes,

Fez is an indie game that’s been in development for five years but continuous interaction with fans and trailers that highlighted the core gameplay, along with improvements to the game engine, went a long way to maintaining curiosity about Phil Fish’s game.

True. And it is also true that Fez precipitated a major ethical crisis at the GDC this year, when Phil Fish entered his game for a second time into the same competition purely out of self-interest (Note: I am not singling out Phil Fish – he seems like a decent enough guy, I’m just using this as a recent example). His appearance in Indie Game: The Movie similarly reveals the indie games’ industry’s sad history of shameless self-promotion, endless navel gazing and cult-of-the-celebritization. In The Competition: The Story Behind the IGF’s Critics Brendy Caldwell does a great job of summarizing the controversy here,

… in 2008, Fez won in the Excellence in Visual Arts category at the IGF. It certainly is a lovely looking game, I can personally testify to that. In 2012 it remains unreleased and subsequently re-enters the IGF for that year (and is eventually nominated for both the Technical Excellence award and the Seamus McNally Grand Prize).

Fez went on to win the Seamus McNally Grand Prize, worth $30,000 USD.

So what is the danger here? What’s wrong with a guy who shows off his little game?

1. The controversy helped to fuel a new ecology for what I call ‘moral entrepreneurs’… journalists, developers and nobodies who use moral crises as ways of promoting themselves (I won’t mention any names here). There was a massive backlash to Phil Fish’s promotion strategy, and instead of focusing on the issues at hand and the games we care about, moral opportunists used this crisis as a ripe opportunity to viciously personally attack Phil Fish, and in so doing draw attention to themselves.
2. I do not see the public value that is served in self-promotion. Easy-to-chew sound-bites and one-liners, hastily injected into press kits, 0nly serve to devalue gaming as a whole. When a developer encourages a game site (or magazine) to use ready-made text, this discourages independent thought. Needing to railroad a writer into a particular view of your game is, to me, evidence that your game probably sucks. Worse, videos like Anthony Carboni’s recent sycophantic interviews with indie developers do nothing to improve the perception that indie developers are in bed with the media; instead suggesting that journalists are more interested in basking in reflected glory than critical and honest evaluations of games.
3. All of the work that hard-working people like Phil Fish put into their promotion strategy is time that could have been used in making a better game. Appearing at industry events like the GDC may be a requirement for AAA publishers, but I fail to see how attending the Independent Games Festival makes your game any more playable. When I attended the IGF/GDC in 2009, there was no time for developers and players to have a meaningful conversation. When you approach an IGF booth, you wait in line for 10 minutes and play for a few minutes – then you ask a few cursory questions about the game with the developer, and make room for someone else to play. The IGF is all about promotion and is not about tuning gameplay, just the Oscars don’t help people make better films.
4. Aggressively promoting your game puts you personally into ethically dangerous waters. There is nothing worse than seeing a great game get shunned because its developer made a serious (or minor) error in judgement when dealing with the press. I can’t count how many times I’ve heard players promise that they’d never buy a game from ________________ because the developer accidentally said something morally questionable in an interview.

A Quality-Driven Approach to Promotion

Instead of thinking from a marketing perspective, I think that the marketing perspective needs to become the outcome of careful design and play-testing. Indie developers have to stop thinking with dollar signs in their eyes, stop thinking about how their game will serve to stroke their ego, and start thinking about whether their game even deserves to be promoted at all. This is an overgeneralization, but many games like Minecraft sold well because they were great games. We will still be talking about Minecraft in ten years, but we won’t be talking about games like Super Meat Boy in one year. Why? Because Minecraft was developed with the care and love that comes with slow and incremental design that emerged over years; it did not rely upon self-promotion. People love Minecraft because of the breadth and depth of its gameplay, not because of a superficial retroesque charm… such as the meaningless gameplay of Super Meat Boy.

Here are some lessons we might learn from a quality-driven approach:

1. Your game can succeed on the basis of its expressive qualities alone; let real writers do their jobs to find you.
2. Ever seen how much money it costs to attend the GDC or IGF? Aping publishers who aggressively market their games costs a lot of time and money. Perhaps that time is better spent focusing and improving on your game.
3. Develop close, honest and respectful relationships with your fellow developers and community of gamers. These are the people who will give you the shirts off their backs, and do anything to see your little creation survive in the wilderness of the industry.
4. As Ben Ruiz said at a recent GDC presentation, “quit being so fucking egocentric.” The whole notion of “independent” in indie games is a complete falsification of the truth. There is no such thing as independent game development – there is only interdependent game development. You need your fellow developers and gamers as much as they need you; the games industry is a very large ecology with many niches. Instead of playing your personal creation off over and against AAA developers, and cultivating your own ego, why not see how AAA developers and their games can help to improve your project?

Obviously, these are pretty polemic issues. I don’t mean to oversimplify the marketing difficulties that indie developers face, but I hope to at least point out that marketing and promotion bring up ethical problems that the industry has not addressed. And by ignoring these ethical issues, indie developers are only inviting the kinds of problems that AAA publishers are already faced with.

I’d like to hear what you’ve got to say about this, whether you’re an indie developer, AAA developer, gamer, journalist, or someone else.

Welcome to the new, hopefully improved, probably more interesting, definitely more frequently updated, and (maybe) more enjoyable Artful Gamer. As you can see, a lot has changed.

The Early Years

Back when I wrote my first post on March 13th, 2007, I had a very different kind of site in mind: “art games” were emerging as new and interesting approaches to video gaming, and I hoped to hitch a ride on that bandwagon. The art debate played well with a lingering malaise about the quality of video games writing in the air – the journalism of Gamepro and other massive magazines were gradually being supplanted by non-journalists and other writers (like myself) who just wanted to talk about games with a knowledgeable audience. Folks wanted to debate how and why we should talk about games as a way of life, whether games were “mere entertainment” or something deeper.

But at the time, few other blogs existed: Chris Bateman’s Only a Game was a little over a year old, Gnome’s The Gnome’s Lair and Corvus Elrod’s Man Bytes Blog were about a year old, Jason Rohrer’s Arthouse Games was a couple of months old, and Michael Abbott’s Brainy Gamer would not launch for another six months. There just weren’t very many places for mature, interesting conversation.

But despite the heated arguments that emerged from the great art debates of 2007, the storm soon lost its power. Sharing no common language for video games, most of us realized that we couldn’t just argue about what games were about, the blogging community actually had to spend some time thinking about what it meant to play games. This led to a fairly significant shift away from game-blogging as a way of letting others know what the game of the week was, towards more critical, analytical and experiential approaches to thinking about games.

The Golden Years of Game Blogging

In those years – say, from 2008-2010, the game blogging community was a hotbed of discussion: for the first time ever, you could google for “Mass effect review” and come up with thoughtful commentary and criticism on video games that wasn’t written by a major gaming magazine or online publisher. For better or for worse, game bloggers filled in the gigantic linguistic gap that was left from the disappearance of print magazines.

I took my own approach in that time: interleaving my personal experiences (past and present) with philosophy and psychology in order to expose something new about games. I hoped that, deep down, the poetic and lyrical aspects of video games resonated with some of you in the ways that they resonated with me. But that style of writing wasn’t for everyone, and more often than not my interlocutors felt that the writing was too dense, or not dense enough, too analytical, or not analytical enough. And so on.

The Quiet End

Then, in 2010, things started to slow down in the game blogging community. Fewer and fewer blogs were being posted to regularly (including this one), some disappeared completely. The great gold rush that the “Brainysphere” ushered in, was over. Some of the bloggers got jobs in the gaming industry as either developers or as journalists; others pursued their educational aspirations or careers in unrelated fields. Sure, there are more game bloggers out there than ever, but the core blogs that were powerhouses in the Golden Age of Game Blogging (2008-2010) had moved on.

The Artful Gamer, in that time, barely loped along. I was finishing writing my doctoral dissertation, teaching, and was newly married. I neglected the site, and it showed. I made a few abortive attempts at constructive conversation on Twitter, but soon realized that Twitter is not a place for conversation; it is a place for gossip and moralism.

But the demand for thoughtful and honest commentary on video games has not went away. There are more people today, reading and writing about games, than there ever have been.

Postcards from the Multiverse

So, now, five years after I wrote my first post that (as Chris Bateman would tell me years later) horribly offended the respective writers of Game Writing: Narrative Skills for Video Games, I am back on the mule. As you will see in my first new article, I have turned towards a different style of writing that – I hope – is a helluva lot more fun to read. And hopefully, it remains insightful. My first post in this new style is The Land of Tamir: The Text Parser as Play. Let me know what you think

Every week I will write a postcard back home, from whatever planet, town, village, dungeon, galaxy, fairy tale, bathroom, space ship or house I happen to be in. And I hope that you’ll write me back. 

Thanks for all of your supportive, interesting, thoughtful, and insightful replies over the years. Your commentary and responses mean the world to me.

Yours humbly,

- Chris.

Dear Mom,

Bad news. I’m writing to you from a little mansion somewhere in southern Tamir, and I’m stuck. There’s a trapdoor in the ceiling of this room, and I can’t get at it. I tried moving the furniture, but it won’t let me. I tried jumping for it, but my skirt isn’t really geared for jumping. I have all kinds of stuff in my inventory, and none of it works. It even took a long time to get here – seems like everything I try, the world won’t let me do it.

That reminded me of something. Remember when I was a kid, and my sister and I would goof around in King’s Quest IV? We didn’t care if the game didn’t let us do certain things – we just enjoyed screwing around with the world. We’d try to do nonsense stuff like “kick pan in his fat ass” or “punch the minstrel”. Most of the time we’d get back a generic “Can you try saying that in a different way?” or “You’ll have to take a different approach”… but sometimes something hilarious would happen. If we tried to fart on the dwarf, we’d get back “Perhaps you need to purchase a copy of ‘Leisure Suit Larry’?” (*sigh*. Yes mom, I secretly played Leisure Suit Larry with my buddies when I was 12.)

The point is that the text parser was fun partly because it was so finicky and antiquated, and partly because we were goofy kids. Nowadays, I can’t move through the world fast enough because this damned parser keeps getting in the way. Not to mention these ridiculous puzzles! Who the hell put a trapdoor in the ceiling that isn’t accessible from the floor? Why is there an Egyptian crypt in a land full of Anglo-Saxons? Why am I allowed to rob a half-dozen graves near the mansion, but I’m not allowed to steal a bowl of freakin’ soup?

Anyway, I guess I have something to learn from my twelve-year-old self: whenever I get frustrated with a place, it’s probably because I’m not really playing in it anymore.

Love,

Chris

ps: send me a grappling hook with 25ft of rope.

pps: none of the houses in Tamir seem to have toilets. Send me some TP too?

As you’ve probably noticed, things slowed down with the Artful Gamer over the last couple of years. What was I doing in that time? Well, I was working on a doctorate, among several other projects, and that was finally completed just a couple of months ago. Now I have some time to work on some real writing.

On March 13, 2012, I will be restructuring and rebuilding the Artful Gamer as a different kind of experience. Hope to see you all there.

The RPG Maker crowd is a world unto its own. I’ve steered clear of the fan projects that emerge from it over the years, because, let’s face it, the depth of gameplay and story that I need in games often isn’t there. But, based on a recommendation from the nice folks at Meridian Dance (site now defunct), I gave it a shot. Despite my own misgivings about RPG Maker games, I was delighted (and disturbed) to find a game that invoked more emotion in me than any other indie game to date.

Before you read on, head over to the Wither page and give it a go (Windows-only, Mac users will have to run Parallels/VMWare/Boot Camp). The game can be finished in 5-10 minutes. If you’re not the kind who cares about spoilers, then please, read on…

On its surface Wither won’t grab most players. It visually borrows the cabbage-green Game Boy aesthetic of the 80′s and 90′s, the sounds are lifted from other games, the gameplay isn’t much of an improvement upon Pokémon Red, there are no battles to speak of, the story is small and unambitious, and its earnest 8-bit melodies hardly stir up a sense of grandeur.

But even a few minutes of the delightfully simple yet otherworldly dialogue disturbs me from any of these criticisms. Wither’s charm comes from the tiny, almost unnoticeable details that unsettle me. When I sit down on the bed, I am prompted with YOU HAVE A NIGHTMARE. The phrase prepares me for a journey into a desolate underworld littered with the skulls and carcasses of animals, juxtaposed with beautiful flowers.The music reminds me of the kind played in funeral homes: synthesized organs echoing the somber mood that call me back to memories of a dead loved one. The grey/green-scale artwork embraces a monochromatic world, as a story about guilt and depression quickly emerges. The lighthearted Game Boy-esque experience manages a perfect disharmony with its sober tone. But all of these elements are crafted together with subtlety, and the author doesn’t beat us over the head with cheap metaphors or sentiment.

What separates Wither from games like Jason Rohrer’s Passage that try to grapple with the same kinds of human existential problems? Passage tries to mechanically represent emotion through gameplay (e.g. walking forward in time and watching one’s loved one age and die) that leaves absolutely no room for interpretation. In contrast, through strangely poetic moments like having bizarre nightmares and witnessing suicides, Wither leaves the protagonist’s psychological world open to interpretation.

If it is clear to the player that at some point the protagonist has reached the Farthest Shore (quite literally – via a boat) in search of her/his loved one, just what this means is open for debate. How should one deal with personal tragedy? Does losing someone mean losing one’s own life too? Or is there a way of coming back to the world of the living after making this crossing? The game was never intended to address (or answer) existential questions, but the fact that I can entertain these questions after playing through Rastek’s “poetic-prose” is a recognition of Wither’s minimalistic expressive power. Wither is, by design or by accident, far more artistic than any game that advertises itself as such.

Note: Melly Tan has a much more extended and articulate write-up on Wither that I could only dream of writing myself. I strongly suggest reading her article if you’ve played the game and are craving more analysis.

When I read Jorge Albor’s recent post “True and False Memories” over at Experience Points, I was genuinely touched by the experience he earnestly articulated. He describes the intense feeling of familiarity and comfort that we have when we play certain games; I can think of no better term to describe that feeling than what Jorge calls “homecoming”. In Jorge’s case, that feeling of homecoming appeared when he inhabited the familiar space, the sights and sounds, of Aperture Labs in Portal 2. Like picking up a new pair of shoes and finding out that they fit just like a pair in childhood did. Jorge rightly distinguishes homecoming from recollection – the latter being a specific memory tied to a specific past, while the former being a feeling tied to an imagined past. In this post I try to work out what homecoming means, and show that it is neither a case of false memory or nostalgia, but rather a different kind of true memory: one that discloses a personal past that should-have-been.

Homecoming: False Memory or Truth?

How is it that we can experience homecoming in a completely new game? Conventional psychological theory tells us that memories are like photographic images stored somewhere in the brain, and when we have a memory of something that we could not have possibly experienced in our lifetime, that it is a “false memory”. Similarly, when someone hearkens back to a childhood that seems altogether rose-tinted, we accuse them of nostalgia for a past that never really existed. In both cases there is heavy emphasis upon the idea that what is “true” or “real” about our memories is that they correctly represent what “actually” happened in the past. When we let sentimental/romantic feelings like comfort and familiarity take us over, the memories we have are distorted by those feelings.

An Imagined Childhood

But that does not help to explain how and why homecoming feels real to us, and how a brand new game can send our hearts back to a past that we may not have even experienced for ourselves. Most recently, I had that feeling playing Mount & Blade: Warband. The first hour of Warband was like being sent back to the early 1990′s, playing Sid Meier’s Pirates! I am not the first person to comment on the many similarities between Warband and Pirates! (some even sneer ‘It is just Pirates! with horses and castles’). But it wasn’t just the gameplay that reminded me of Sid Meier’s original creation, it was the entire expressive style of Warband that made me feel like I was back home, huddled around an old 286 with a couple of my buddies, doing our damndest to haul ass back to Antigua with a frigate full of illicit booty.

The thing is, I never owned Pirates! back in the 1990′s. But a couple of my friends did own the game, and they would regale me with tales of buccaneering and swashbuckling on the high seas. They would hang out together in a bedroom during those balmy junior high school summers, glued to the computer and taking turns in the hot seat until the wee hours of the morning. At least, that is how I imagine it. And for all intents and purposes, that’s what growing up on a farm in western Canada was all about in the 90′s: weeks of boredom punctuated by days of intense gaming with your closest friend. (Or, in my case, with my sister).

In actuality, I didn’t play Pirates! Gold until 1998 on my Pentium-133. I played it by myself, in my lonely single-bedroom apartment. No story there.

So: I have this feeling of homecoming when I play Mount & Blade: Warband that hearkens back to a childhood that I did not “actually” live, but I feel like I should have lived. If we listen to the average social psychologist, I sound like an irreparably damaged person who can’t distinguish between their imagination and their recollections.

But if we take a much different approach to memory, what appears to be childish nostalgia is instead a powerful disclosure of the essence of gaming. Phenomenologist and philosopher Gaston Bachelard, thinking about our encounters with bird nests, writes that homecoming “takes us back to our childhood or, rather, to a childhood; to the childhoods we should have had.  For not many of us have been endowed by life with the full measure of its cosmic implications.”

Homecoming as Re-inhabiting the Past

Let’s face it: most of us, in actuality, squandered youthhood on terrible console games and even worse TV shows and music. But the youthhood of the adult, the one that I experience now as I play games in a way that I should have when I was a teenager, creates new memories and new experiences. When I feel homecoming in a great game, I do not fabricate my childhood (as the social psychologist thinks), but I re-imagine what being-at-home felt like as a boy, and lend my childhood over to the experience that I am making with the game.

If that is true – that my childhood is changing and revealing new truths about me as I play games – then we do not interpret games: games interpret us.

For the last five years, I’ve collected all sorts of retro computers and console hardware, everything from a sleek and compact Apple //c to a classy Amiga 1000 to a venerable Game Boy Color. I originally thought that each system would take its place in a monstrous basement boycave full of ye olde games of yesteryear, but the reality of work and family has more or less eradicated that dream. So, instead, I thought I would have some fun as I give away, sell off, and trash some of the systems that have collected dust in my basement over the years.

The first in this series of retro photo shoots is a Commodore 64c. The C64c was a re-release of the original C64. The new, angular, grey case was modelled after the Commodore 128, and featured some design changes to the main board that shrunk the number of chips used by integrating them into the new VLSI chip. The original C64 keyboard – which was brutally difficult to type on – was replaced by a slightly different keyboard with lighter springs, while maintaining the familiar hollow clack!-clack! of each keypress. In Canada, the system was sold for $299.99 CAD at Canadian Tire (a national tool and automotive chain), along with the 1541-II disk drive for a whopping $399.99. The matching Commodore 1802 monitor would run you another $399.99.

This particular machine looks like it sat in some young gamer’s room for years, with fingerprint dirt smudges caked on the * and 8 and 1 keys, and finger grease gunked up around the power switch. Well-loved would be an understatement. I dig through the diskette box: this particular gamer was a fan of side-scrolling action games like Bop’n'Wrestle, Epyx Winter Games and California Games. Interspersed with the action games, there are a fair number of AD&D Gold Box games like Pool of Radiance and Hillsfar. A well-worn copy of Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny even has the original cloth map and the Codex coin. I get the sense that I am either looking at the artifacts of one very well-versed gamer, or perhaps two gamers sharing one computer: one who likes their slow-moving RPGs and the other into fast-paced action. A copy of Gortek and the Microchips tells me that mom and dad insisted that the child learn a programming language. Whoever they were, their parent(s) shelled out over $1100 to put together a very slick system, not to mention one heckuva game collection.

I slide MECC’s Odell Lake into the 1541-II’s disk drive, and flip down the locking lever with a satisfying snick! I type LOAD”*”,8,1 and walk away to grab a coffee. I have enough time to pull a shot of espresso, steam some milk, and grab a handful of cookies. When I come back into the living room, the disk drive is still humming away quietly. Odell Lake appears on the screen, with MECC’s particular style of edutainment.

When I was fourteen years old, I bought the complete Dungeons and Dragons Basic Set from my older teenaged neighbour for $10 (including colour changing dice!). I remember shaking with anticipation as I got home, imagining all of the amazing adventures that my friends and I would go on together. When I got home, I called three of my closest friends up and asked them if they wanted to come over and play a game of D&D together. The response was less than enthusiastic, and the game ended up collecting dust on my bookshelf, along with a dozen-or-so character sheets that I laboriously worked on.

I grew up in a time and place where the word “D&D” was tantamount to declaring yourself a sexless nerd, loner or devil worshipper to the entire junior high school. It was the early 1990′s, and the intense popularity of Dungeons and Dragons in the 70s and 80s was wearing off fast. The idea of sitting around a table with a few buddies and calling up fantasied worlds with a roll of the dice was coming up against the harsher realities of grunge music and the gulf war. The farm town I grew up in was predominantly Catholic. Films like Mazes and Monsters starring Tom Hanks (a teenager who suffers from psychosis and starts to live out his D&D character in real life), and the religious backlash of the 1980s against D&D was firmly embedded in the memories of parents and us kids.

In this article I consider the major comeback, at least in my life and those people around me, that pen’n'paper roleplaying games are making, and consider the repercussions that this will have for how the youth of today will experience future cRPGs.

1990: CRPGs Emerge in the Golden Age

To fill that gap, I turned to computer role playing games like the Ultima series, the Quest for Glory series, Wing Commander: Privateer, Betrayal at Krondor, and (years later) Fallout. These were games that had strong central characters who were on quests to save the world, involved dark and esoteric forms of magic or skilfulness, and demanded an imaginative leap from the player. I had to identify and empathize with the characters of the world if I was going to devote dozens of hours to saving it, and this gaming fulfilled a gigantic imaginative and moral gap in my life as a teenager, allowing me to explore dangerous or taboo topics in a safe manner. These games, while not particularly approved of by most parents and friends (I am sure that my parents worried at how many evenings I spent with Ultima VIII: Pagan), at least were too new to have acquired the stigma that D&D had. If the 1980s was the decade of pen’n'paper gaming, the 1990s was the decade of the CRPG.

(This is fairly consistent with the timeline that Matt Barton draws up in Dungeons & Desktops: The History of Computer Role-Playing Games. Barton argues that the late 1980′s and early 1990′s usher in a “Golden Age” of computer and console roleplaying games.)

Being a teenager during the Golden Age of CRPGs meant that I was in an awkward spot – I was part of a generation who bridged the older pen’n'paper tradition with a new CRPG-literate generation of gamers. I learned some of the language of role-playing through fantasy books, some through my brief flirts with the D&D Basic Set, and most through the dominant CRPGs of that time. My understanding of an RPG was that it was part imagination, but mostly set in a world of characters and places that were pre-determined by the author or designer. Sure, they could come up with non-linear ways of telling a story (i.e. Wing Commander: Privateer follows a largely player-directed story arc) but the content of the game was largely predetermined. Or, if the plot was predeterminate, I might focus on customizing my character and focusing on certain skills and abilities that I found important, such as my Magic User in Quest for Glory. If the game were particularly involving I might invest myself emotionally in the quest by imagining myself into the role of the Avatar or hero, making moral choices that reflected the character whom I wanted to ‘play’. But lost in all of this was the participatory storytelling that made pen’n'paper roleplaying games truly unique.

CRPG Becomes the Norm

What emerged in the late 90′s and early 2000′s was a CRPG-literate crowd of gamers with very specific expectations about what a roleplaying game is. We wanted games with statistics – lots of ‘em. We wanted games with all kinds of open-ended exploration. We wanted games that let us customize our character’s abilities. We wanted party-based adventuring, even though 4 of the 5 party members were computer-controlled. We wanted epic stories that took dozens of hours to complete, each replete with subquests or sidequests to keep us entertained while on the “main” quest.

But lost in this emerging literacy were the original pen’n'paper games that created the metaphors for gameplay that CRPGs aped algorithmically. Kids born in the mid-1990′s have grown up in a world where Dungeons and Dragons no longer carries any meaning beyond being a particular brand of computer role-playing games. Many of the teenagers in our “Art Guild” after-school program are very literate when it comes to playing computer games, but the idea of playing a pen’n'paper adventure seems quaintly confusing to them. Like driving around in your Ford Model-T when you have a Porsche sitting in the garage.

Discovering that the Old is New

Of course, D&D has not remained dormant for the last 30 years. In fact, there are probably more pen’n'paper systems available today than there ever were. So for the last few years, my wife and I have had the great fortune to have participated in a number of campaigns – some as DM, some as players – from Deadlands to Planescape to a re-imagining of Ultima VIII: Pagan. Each time we play, I am struck by the rich and complex social scene that plays out before us.

A few weeks ago I brought in a D&D Basic Set to the Art Guild, and asked a handful of teenagers if they wanted to “play a real role-playing game”. Only one of them had played a pen’n'paper game before, and the rest were curious but totally unfamiliar with D&D. So we sat down, rolled up some very basic character sheets, and began our journey.

DM: “You are standing on a 30-foot high cobblestone wall.”

Player 1: “Why?”

DM: “I’m not sure. You hear the sound of a gong behind you, along with villagers screaming ‘get him!’ and ‘he’s on top of the wall!’

Player 2: “What do I do?”

DM: “I’m not sure. What do you want to do?”

Player 2: “Ummm. What are my options?”

DM: “Well, the wall is a 30 foot drop. You figure that you might be able to climb down if you take your time. There are handholds in the rough cobblestone.”

Player 2: “I want to climb down then.”

DM: “Give me a roll on your D20.”

Player 3: “Which one is the D20?”

And so on.

Three hours later, they had been assaulted by guards dressed in red gowns, fled down a steep switchback mountain path, clung for their lives after falling off the steep sides of the path, got lost in a forest, were assailed by pygmies, and buried a skeleton that they found laying alongside the road. In each of these situations, the characters found themselves arguing over complex issues of trust, greed, courage, friendship and disloyalty. They bargained with one another, joked and teased one another, and learned to tread the fine line between what is ‘in game’ (their character) and what is ‘out of game’ (themselves).

At an individual level, I noticed that each player learned how to communicate their actions and express their thoughts in a much more clear and articulate manner than usual. Ambiguous speech acts like “I walk into the dark forest” were usually met with clarifications from the DM “Well, which direction? In front of you? Do you have a light?” or sometimes with outright remonstrations from the DM, “You walk into the dark forest without a light. You are now lost.”

I also noticed that a few players also took risks that they would have never taken in real life. Stealing something from another person would be impossible for most of these teenagers, but in the game they were able to explore iniquitous acts without serious repercussion. They learned, for instance, that a character needs a motivational space that makes sense of their action – they can’t just walk off the side of a mountain without a sensible reason, or commit an act of evil without some kind of moral context.

Recovering a Tradition

What I am beginning to appreciate is that there is a new generation of CRPGers, who were previously unfamiliar with D&D that are just becoming familiar with pen’n'paper games. Judging by the two three-hour sessions that I have played with the teenagers from the Art Guild, D&D is by far the most successful group activity we have had in 7 months. Already several of them want to learn how to DM and create their own worlds, and take other players out on adventures.

The upshot of this, I hope, is that this new generation of gamers – who are now playing pen’n'paper games – will create a desire to completely revitalize the idea of a CRPG. I don’t think that we need another Baldur’s Gate. I think we need to recapture the vitality and rich social space enacted in pen’n'paper sessions. Designers of the future need to remember that role-playing games are primarily played with friends and involve working out complex social relationships that exist outside of the game. I think that we need CRPGs that aren’t about “choosing moral option A or B”, but rather about having the player ask themselves, “what kind of character is s/he? Would s/he do this?”

Games like Mass Effect 2 and BioShock have returned us to the original problem of telling a story in a coherent manner, while inviting input from the player, but still have not addressed the more fundamental problem that an RPG involves: learning how to clarify one’s own decisions and emotions within a safe, bounded, environment.

I appreciate that CRPGs have become their own modes of expression with standards of their own that do not refer back to pen’n'paper games. But, judging by the quality of the RPG sessions I have participated in, they could still learn a thing or ten. I hope that this new generation of gamers creates a desire for richer CRPGs – games that are more connected to the human feeling and morality that is expressed in the average pen’n'paper session.

Every time I hear Infocom’s text adventure Planetfall brought up amongst gamers, usually my age or a bit older, someone inevitably brings up their relationship with Floyd – a little ‘bot that is your sole partner for the bulk of the game. Floyd follows you around the abandoned planet, making the occasional smart-assed comment, and helps with the occasional task. At a critical moment of the game, Floyd – and I quote wikipedia here – “performs the ultimate sacrifice and gives his life to retrieve the vital Miniaturization Card from the Biolab” [1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetfall].

In recent years, Floyd dying in the Biolab has become a touchstone for gaming emotion. It is now often cited as a critical moment in the developmental path of gaming, along with (of course) Aerith dying in Final Fantasy VII. (For instance – in the comments area of 11 Nerdy Moments Guaranteed to Make You Cry a few people mention Floyd and effectively put it on the same spectrum as Spock dying in Star Trek and Gandalf dying in Lord of the Rings.) Character death is now a celebrated aspect of the gamer mythos. In this article I take apart what I see as false nostalgia that has sanctified one of the least important parts of Planetfall at the cost of missing the one thing that makes Planetfall stand out as one of the most important text adventures of today.

(If you care about “spoilers”, and haven’t, in the last 27 years taken the time to play Planetfall – now might be a good time to stop reading and start playing.)

Not a lot was said about this moment back in the 1980s. In fact, other than the occasional “Floyd was really cool”, almost nothing was said about Floyd prior to the emergence of the post-2005 gamer/nerd aesthetic. Even James A. McPherson’s (1984) Computer Gaming World review (p. 44) paints Floyd in a somewhat ambivalent light, suggesting that he is (at first) an annoyance, which the reviewer slowly grew to see as a companion.

... You will meet a robot named Floyd. In the beginning, Floyd might be a nuisance because of his incessant babbling, but as you have probably already guessed he plays an important part in the completion of the game. Floyd's interaction is a very unique
concept in this game. It adds animation to the game without relying on graphics. (In certain parts of the complex I had already mapped I found myself hurrying through the
rooms. As this left Floyd far behind, I ended up slowing down to wait for Floyd to catch up.)

... The addition of Floyd the robot as your part- ner is a unique boost to the interactive nature of these games and I hope to see more of this type of creative innovation in future games.

Maybe McPherson did not want to ruin the ending for new players, but I don’t see anything approaching the histrionics of gamers today who think back to dear little Floyd. Floyd hardly figures into the review any more than an interesting gameplay innovation. What I’m getting at is that gamers have come, through a combination of blind personal nostalgia and participation within a cloistered gamer culture, to exaggerate the meaning of what is a highly overrepresented aspect of Planetfall. Floyd is not a compelling character, and barely amounts to a loyal dog that stays by your side throughout.

What I’m trying to say is that the vast majority of gamers have missed out on the most important part of the game.

Microcosmicity

The philosopher and phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard has something to say about “cosmicity” – the inconceivable vastness of the universe that we experience when we encounter a cosmic poetic image – in say, a poem. The first stanza of William Blake’s oft-quoted poem Auguries of Innocence is a standard example:

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.

For Bachelard, perceiving infinitude in the miniature is essential to the growth of consciousness. Our world – quite literally – becomes larger as we imagine cosmic vastness. Simultaneously, as we perceive things in miniature, the geometrically tiny encloses something impossibly large. The examples of this today are innumerable – especially in childrens’ popular culture: Basil the Hare freely commiserates with the mice of Redwall Abbey in Brian Jacques’ Redwall series, Tuck Pendleton of Innerspace is miniaturized (along with his spaceship) and injected into a man’s body, or when Flynn is digitized and inserted into the ENCOM mainframe in Tron. In all of these, a leap of the imagination is necessary: I know that Basil is literally 50 times the size of Matthias in Redwall, but I imagine them to live in the same space. The imagination makes literal impossibilities fictional realities. And for Bachelard, who sees the imagination and consciousness as malleable parts of our human makeup, imagining the impossibly infinite is an expansion of our way of being in the world.

Becoming The Grain of Sand

Where does Planetfall fit in this? It is one of the few games that seamlessly integrates microcosmicity into its experience… so much so that the player can feel the mutual intimacy of the miniature and the vast. The scene happens after Floyd has retrieved the miniaturization card for you and died for his efforts. To get off the island, you must first fix a problem with the computer – there is a fault at Relay Station 384 on the computer’s motherboard. Here is what happens:

You - and the laser beam you carry - climb into a miniaturization booth and are shrunken to a being just a few microns across. The computer's circuit board becomes a gigantic maze of highways and platforms - copper traces, junctions and gates. Wielding the laser, you walk over to a nearby relay station and fire several times at a gigantic meteorite, sitting between the relay and the rest of the circuit, preventing it from functioning. The meteorite - an infinitesimal spec of dust to the naked eye - dwarfs you. You walk back to the entrance and encounter a microbe hell-bent on eating you alive. You fire at the microbe relentlessly, and your laserbeam has no effect on the montrosity. The laser is growing hot in your hands. Finally, frustrated, you throw your laser over the side of the platform and the microbe chases after it into oblivion. You run back to the entrance, and you are re-atomized into your former size. All of this happens in a few nanoseconds.

Experiencing Games

Compare my description above of what I see as the most important scene in the game – of being de-atomized and shrunken, destroying a particle of dust with a laser, and being chased by a gigantic microbe – to the oft-spoken sentiment “Floyd’s death made me sad.” I don’t dispute that Floyd’s death was saddening – what I dispute is that his death carries much significance for us as people. I don’t think about Floyd at night, before I go to bed.

What I do imagine is being shrunken to the size of a butterfly’s eyelash, and running around in a labyrinth of tunnels and junctions. In other words, the simple emotion of sadness does not lead me anywhere new – it is just what it is. But microcosmicity… the experience of vastness in an impossible small space… is a new experience and opens me up to new kinds of imagining.