The Artful Gamer

When I was six years old, my mother worked in an Adult Education Centre – her job was to train and teach adults, usually women who had been living as house wives for most of their lives, how to re-integrate into the workforce. The Adult Education Centre was a stone’s throw from my elementary school at the time, so my sister and I would walk over there and spend the afternoon with my mom after school most days. Sure, getting to spend the afternoon with my mom and sister was always great… but the real reason I went there was my love affair with the single taciturn and sensible IBM PC XT with a monochrome monitor that sat on a table along the wall: It had a game that let me fly a plane.

In this article I explore the different qualities the word “simulation” has, and argue for a more experiential approach to flight. A note to readers: I’d love to hear about your experience with all kinds of flight simulators, because I have intentionally pared it down to just a few here.

Flight Simulation in its Infancy: MSFS 1.0

Microsoft Flight Simulator 1.0 was, to my best knowledge, my first computer gaming experience. One of the teachers – when he wasn’t busy – would sit down with us, and patiently point out the controls: left hand on F2 for power, and right hand on the numeric keypad for direction. My sister would hold down F2, and I’d feebly try to point the “plane” down the runway.

I write “plane” pejoratively. The problem with MSFS 1.0 was that the experience of flight was an afterthought – the aircraft never appears on-screen, the field and runway are low-res projections, engine sound is limited to a variable buzz from the PC speaker, and the instruments are the only real indication that something important is happening.

Inevitably, we would careen down the runway and the plane would edge upwards for a second, stall, and land back on the tarmac. Twenty frustrated minutes later, my sister and I would give up and wander over to the Xerox machine and make copies of our hands.

From a gamer’s perspective, I am being unfair: MSFS1.0 was one of the earliest flight sims, and SubLogic’s programming efforts were leaps and bounds ahead of their competitors. But, I think, when you see past the crude graphics and choppy frame rate, you see less a “game” than a spreadsheet.

So the question is: what is being simulated? Should a flight simulator try to simulate the experience of flight, or simulate the mathematics of instrumentation?

Ask anyone that’s flown in the front seats of a smaller aircraft like a Cessna 172 or Piper Cherokee: the aircraft is very responsive. A feather touch on the control column pitches down the nose a few degrees, and the tail snaps upright in a single motion… your gut climbs up into your throat, and your head swims for a brief second. The sound of the little engine thrums in the cabin, and penetrates past the David Clark headset that is vacuum-sealed around your ears. As a passenger, I can stare at the instruments and appreciate that there are a dozen things happening simultaneously, but I really don’t know (or care) what they mean. I’m focused on the feeling of flight itself.

A Step Closer: Aces of the Pacific

Fast forward about seven years. Sitting in my uncle and aunt’s office, with a much heftier and sexier machine: an AST Advantage! 386 with a 256-color VGA card. They owned Aces of the Pacific and a CH Products Flightstick Pro. Afternoons were spent gunning down Japanese Zero’s from the cabin of my P-38 Lightning.

The flight model in Aces of the Pacific is pretty responsive. As you’ll see in the video, climbing off of the runway is effortless… the engines rev up to max within a couple seconds, getting up to takeoff speed within five seconds, and once in the air the aircraft snaps left and right as if it were a dragonfly. A real P-38 flies nothing like this. But, I spent months dogfighting and bombing, running missions for both sides of the second World War just to scrape up another hour of time in the cockpit. It was fun.

But when you strip away the art, there wasn’t very much difference between Aces of the Pacific and Wing Commander II. The “simulation” of flight in these flight combat games was so heavily tuned for combat that any semblance of simulation was tossed out the window. Training my 37mm cannon on a Japanese Zero at 8,000 feet wasn’t much different than training up my Broadsword’s Mass Drivers on a Kilrathi Dralthi at Nav 1. Something was lost in the experience of flight in Aces of the Pacific, and it wasn’t until 1995 that Looking Glass Technologies finally got it right. And, to my knowledge, no flight simulator has gotten the experience of flight right since.

What it Really Feels like to Fly: Flight Unlimited

Sitting in my uncle and aunt’s office in 1995, this time with an even beefier Gateway 2000 Pentium 90 that my uncle called “The Ol’ Stove” because the processor alone could heat up a room. But that kind of horsepower was necessary, because Flight Unlimited demanded some pretty serious computing resources.

I sit down in the Pitts Special S2-B and harness up. The view out the front is limited by a handful of gauges, and the wing that tapers across the nose of my little aerobatics plane. Revving up the single engine is a pleasure in itself – it was obviously recorded from a real Pitts Special, and the engine noise changes in pitch and loudness according to its RPMs. The plane lurches forward on the runway, and as I get up to stall speed I notice it start to shimmy back and forth slightly … the wheels are grabbing at the tarmac at different rates, just as I’ve felt in a Cessna 172 as we lift off. A few feet above the runway I experience the “ground effect” – the Pitts floats as if on a cushion due to the increased lift caused by the air pressure being so high close to the tarmac. When I hit climb speed, I pull back hard on the control stick, and the Pitts climbs up into the atmosphere with a metallic groan.

I climb up to 5000 feet for a little fun: the in-game flight instructor is teaching me down to do a “spin” – a forced stall that causes a plane to pitch downward into a corkscrew path. I point the nose up at the sun, cut the engines and hit the left rudder. What happens? My Pitts Special turns to the left and begins to dive, corkscrewing around the left wing. My speed is increasing, and begins to redline the airspeed indictor. I’m “overspeeding” the airframe, and the wind rushing past the wings gives off an eery metallic whine. I don’t want to crash, so I follow the virtual flight instructor’s advice: cut the throttle, apply full rudder in the opposite direction of the spin (in my case, right rudder), and gradually pull back to zero-out my angle of attack. Unbelievably, I recover from the spin, and resume level flight like a pro. And damn, that was fun!

A few minutes later, I do the same spin maneuver and intentionally overspeed the aircraft, and as I careen towards the terrain below, I snap back on the control stick and watch as the forces applied to the fuselage and wings snap the little plane apart. They smash into the ground in a pile of parts that the FAA/NTSB crash investigations teams would have a hard time deciphering. My flight instructor wryly adds a note to the logbook: “Solo flight. Wrecked the plane. We’ll fly in your plane from now on.”

 A Pitts Special exploding in the air as the airframe collapses under extreme G-forces

The whole experience, from takeoff to aerobatic techniques to engine noise (or in the case of the engineless sailplane – the whoosh of air around the cabin), is responsive and enveloping. Anyone who has flown in a small aircraft can attest to how different Flight Unlimited is, say, compared to Microsoft Flight Simulator X.

Computational Fluid Dynamics for Dummies

Flight Unlimited was, and is, the first and only flight simulation game to use a completely different flight physics model. An interview with Seamus Blackley (published in CGW Issue #133, August 1995 - I honestly suggest reading the entire article, it is excellent) – the programmer and designer behind the game – reveals the unique values and skills that went into developing an accurate simulation of flight:

When Blackley set out to design this flight simulation, he wanted the armchair pilot to get that “yummy, visceral, fluid feeling that you get when flying a real airplane.” To do that, Blackley and the Flight Unlimited team had to dive head-first into the Navier-Stokes equations, which, according to Blackley, are “horrible, complicated partial differential equations” that model the way a fluid behaves when it moves around a solid object.

Instead of relying upon a Newtonian system of drag coefficients and vector geometry – where an object remains in motion until it meets an equal and opposite force, or a brute-force approach that models flight on huge tables of data generated in wind turbine lab experiments - Flight Unlimited was built on a physics model derived from Computational Fluid Dynamics.

Blackley, a pilot himself and an ex-graduate student in particle physics at the time, turned to computational fluid dynamics because they could model the feeling of flight moreso than the mathematics of movement. And with computers featuring built-in floating-point processors (like the Pentium) and tons of calculation cycles available, it became possible to use CFDs for the first time in a computer game.

So how does Flight Unlimited actually work? First off, the complex sets of Navier-Stokes partial differential equations would allow the game to simulate the effects of air pressure on a fixed wing: when the air pressure above the wing is less than the air pressure below the wing, the air (a fluid) makes the wing buoyant and pushes the airplane up into the air.

That process is complicated enough, but add to it the infinitely complex changes in air pressure over the entire plane:

… the propeller creates turbulence and a torque imbalance; the air eddies and curls as it comes off the back of the wing; the air “sticks” to the surface of the airplane, causing drag; and bumps in the plane’s shape, such as the pilot’s canopy, cause turbulence in the moving air. All of this adds up to one hell of a mathematical nightmare, but all of those little blips in turbulence and pressure are calculated by the Navier-Stokes equations…

…the program must compute the air pressures over the entire surface of the airplane, and convert those pressures into a series of force distributions, which are then used to calculate where and how the plane is moving.

 An image generated by a Navier-Stokes analysis of air eddying off a wingtip.

In short, the plane flies through the air because Blackley has simulated an atmosphere in the world that applies air pressure changes to the entire aircraft, and the “control surfaces” of the plane – the rudder, the ailerons, the elevator – all create turbulence and disturbances in the atmosphere that pitch, roll, and lift the plane. A plane feels like a plane because it displaces, and is displaced by, air. As Blackley puts it, “You get everything for free once you get the air’s fluid dynamics right.”

Final Words for Developers

Make no mistake – I’m not arguing for pin-point accurate physics simulation as the key for more immersive and more enjoyable flight simulators (or any other kind of game). In fact, I’ve argued before that we probably should rely a lot less upon “realism” as a central value in most games. The point is that games like Flight Unlimited manage to deliver an enjoyable and visceral flight experience because the developers make the experience, and not the mathematics the core value of the simulator. Developers need to learn to leave the mathematical aspects of games “under the hood” and make them completely subsidiary to the player’s experience. After all, the only thing we have as players is our experience of the game.

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?

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.

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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.)

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A little story first.

“My son. He’s such a geek”, my mother ribbed at me in her familiar Québéçoise accent. She flipped over the jewel case in my hands and looked at the back cover, and shook her head.

I looked up at the cashier, my eyes pleading for some way out of this. She giggled instead, and I blushed. I gave my mother an “Aw mom!” look.

I was 15 years old, and we were standing at the checkout of a London Drugs store in the city. The store carried everything, from diapers and bee-sting kits, to Polaroid cameras and Froot Loops. I was here for the computer games.

The back of the store had a bargain shelf lined with computer games..most of them were crap shareware titles like PKWare Utilities and the occasional decent Crazy Nick’s Software Picks: Robin Hood’s Game of Skill and Chance. Among the rows of CD’s and floppies, a Dynamix logo on a white jewel case caught my eye. It was a game I had never heard of before, and it was on CD-ROM! A talkie adventure game. For $19.99. I rescued The Adventures of Willy Beamish from the shelf and carried it back to the cashier like a sacrificial offering.

At the time, my mother didn’t understand. She probably hoped that my crazy obsession with games would pass.. along with saturday morning cartoons and remote control cars. Or maybe she thought it was just another game that I would play for a couple of hours and lose interest in.

But it was a Sierra game. It had Sierra artwork and Sierra music. I played Willy Beamish for months. I relished the stunning artwork and expressive animation. I had never seen a game before – other than Dragon’s Lair – that had every character hand-animated in each scene (instead of using a repeated walk animation). The rich (256) colour palette rotated with night and day. For a nerdy fifteen year-old living on a farm in the middle of nowhere, Willy Beamish’s little suburban neighbourhood and treehouse was a real place to hide out in. The art, the animation, the music and voices, all conspired to create a place for daydreaming.

Fast-forward 15 years. I get a call from a friend of mine, Eriq Chang, whose artwork I featured in an article some time ago. Apparently – for several years – Sierra enthusiasts Brandon Klassen and Eriq Chang, have been secretly working on an Art Book that tells the graphical history of Sierra On-Line adventure games. Eriq would not tell me any more than “we’ll send you some teasers before launch.”

In this article, Brandon Klassen tells us just what The Art of Sierra is, and what the project means for him personally. Brandon and Eriq have generously sent me two promotional teaser shots of the upcoming book (included, see below), and let me tell you: I can’t fucking wait.

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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.)

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