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.
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From gnome:
What? You didn’t cry? You have no soul then dear Chris. Then again, I didn’t cry either, nor did I feel particularly sad. Truth be said, the only game that made me momentarily feel bad was Vampire Bloodlines, when the game -wisely judging by my previous actions- didn’t allow me to spare the life of a generally nice blood-junkie. Anyway. Another excellent piece!
From chris:
Glad to hear that I’m not totally out of touch with the world dear gnome
I know exactly the scene that you are referring to in VTMB – I got caught in that too. Fortunately, it has furnished us with something memorable of the game. 
From Dr. Curiosity:
Planetfall was still largely a human environment, and thus more familiar (though the use of human challenges like hunger and fatigue did make the experience feel less stable). I got more feeling of cosmic vastness out of Starcrossed, myself – it felt like a much more alien and precarious environment.
From chris:
Dr. Curiosity – You are completely right on both counts. Planetfall is very much a terrestrial/human environment.. it has very few moments of cosmicity, and it’s all basically survivalism. I shamefully admit that I have not played Starcross yet, but I plan to. I think what I was trying to get across about Planetfall was that whatever cosmic feelings are evoked in the game are because there is this huge discrepancy in size between me-as-Ensign and me-as-microscopic-repairman. It’s not so much the idea of vastness I suppose, but the idea of scale, of change.
That being said – I can’t wait to play Starcross based on your comments alone. I avoided it initially because I felt that I was tainted by Planetfall; that I’d expect something like it. This sounds refreshing. Thanks!
From itamar:
I was happy to read your post on Planetfall! For me as well, Floyd wasn’t the most memorable aspect of the game. I indeed found him annoying at the beginning, then grew to like him, and then mostly felt bewilderment that he would be so eager to help me as to offer to retrieve the card in the bio lab.
But the miniaturization bit wasn’t so memorable either, perhaps because Tron already made me used to that kind of world-in-a-grain-of-sand. The atmosphere of the world – climbing up to the cliff, finding the ruins, exploring them and discovering the emptiness, then slowly the horrible awful secret behind it that is already eating away at your own self – that was special. I think the text-only nature of the game allowed it to be even more powerful in creating this atmosphere.
Thus actually what bothered me most was the end of the game when it turned out the planet’s population had mostly survived; I felt alone during the whole game, and didn’t like the sudden realization that deep beneath my feet, an entire civilization was just waiting to wake up.
Unrelated:
I just ran across your blog now, Chris, and I appreciate its existence! The themes you write about aren’t often discussed, and they speak strongly to my own experience of games. I know you mostly think back to older games, but I was surprised to not find much about Fallout 3 in your blog. I found its atmosphere wonderful, too. The ruins of civilization’s infrastructure and the creepily cheerful 50′s music. I’d be curious to hear more of your thoughts about it.
From chris:
@Itamar -
Thank you for your insightful thoughts. Yeah, I wondered if the miniaturization scene had resonated with anyone else. I had also saw Tron, but this was the first time that I had the sense of miniature in a video game. The atmosphere is, as you point out, wonderful. It’s too bad that the sense of wonderment is hard-won, since we don’t get to spend much time dwelling in the underground-civilization moment… it’s almost an afterthought when it is finally revealed to the player. Then again, when I go back to Planetfall, it’s great knowing that I will *eventually* find out that truth again…
Thanks so much for your encouragement. I have considered many many times to write something up on Fallout 3, but I always find myself with little to say. I suspect that I don’t quite have enough distance on the game yet to really appreciate its values. If anything, I’d like to write about my experience with F3 after being so thoroughly grounded in Fallout 1 and 2. Perhaps this is a good push to get me started on that article…
Take care,
- Chris
From David:
I have to respectfully disagree. The annoyingness of Floyd’s babbling was mostly due to the limitations of the game, so when you tried various actions the way the game told u “that’s not gonna work” was by Floyd saying something canned. Being “alone” there, by about a fourth of the way thru, I got attached and Floyd was my trusted companion. So yes, when he died, I cried. It wasn’t so much due to his sacrifice, but the way it was written. Best of all, it was an emotional moment that actually was built to, not just the quick and dirty kind of emotional manipulation that makes you cry in a Disney movie. I have to say, the best part of Planetfall was the packaging. There is SO much humor in every piece, so much of it in the “Hitchhiker’s Guide” sort of delivery, but funnier in almost every way to me. Then again, WTF did I know, I was like 12.