WHAT YOU CAN'T SEE IS WHAT YOU DON'T GET: Life and death of the third-person narrative in the current visual paradigm

I have been playing The Witcher lately. This Polish RPG has got positive reviews in both Old and New World, even with its minor but obvious flaws, inconsistencies and glitches (but CRPG fans cannot be picky these days...).
One of the inconsistencies ruined my suspension of disbelief big time. As usual with Baldur's Gate-inspired RPGs, most of the narrative is revealed in conversation with NPCs. But, given the limited animation they have, the NPCs sometimes speak as if they were doing something else that they're doing in their visual representation. The chemist in the chemistry workshop welcomes you while mixing substances to make an explosive, and asks you (or, the player character) to hold your breath, so that you don't interfere with the experiment. What struck me as strange was the fact that while he was describing the delicate operation he was performing, his "avatar" was justing standing around with bare hands, seemingly engaged in casual conversation. This raised two uncomfortable questions: 1) Why is he describing his actions, if ("in the reality of the game world") I should be able to watch them for myself? 2) Why can't I see it if it obviously is happening "in the reality of the game world"? This is not an uncommon incosistency, especially with RPGs.














The very investigation of why this is so strange made me investigate the modes of visualization of game worlds. I do not want to take any shortcuts, but I immediately thought the discrepancy could be handled by switching to less iconic representation, in which the character's action could be described by third-person narration. It would make so much sense, given that The Witcher is a novel adaptation - and what an awesome novel it is! But written language is pretty much banned from contemporary AAA games (portable consoles being the exception). Could its use enhance the storytelling and gameplay experience? And what is its relationship to the current visual paradigm?

First, let us take a look at the history of the rhetorical relationship between the fictional worlds and their visual representation in digital games. I would like to distinguish between two approaches, that make more sense once they're opposed to each other. First of them, we might call illusionism. In games using this approach, there are no signals that the actual game world should look otherwise that its representation or that there could be more to it than you can see. The world of Mario Bros., for example, is exactly what it looks like in the game. The same holds for Doom. Of course, each of us can make his own mental image of this world, but the graphics of the actual game will be the primary source. Graphics come first.
The second one, we might dub illustrationism. In this approach, the graphics are obviously just a part or a version of what the actual world looks like. They are mere illustrations. The game admits that it does not show you everything. One of the best examples of this approach is that of early illustrated text adventure games. In those, graphics served to the same purpose as illustrations in printed books do. They were hints for imagination and most of the world description was presented as written text. This approach was, at the time, arguably better for conveing images of more complex worlds and more complex actions, because not all of them had to be seen, much of it could be just verbally described. In other words, the world comes first and the graphics try to catch up. ASCII roguelike games are even beyond illustrationism: in these, the ASCII characters are not "representations" of the game world characters in an iconic way of visual resemblance - they are simply indices, placeholders. They just show the spatial whereabouts of the character in relation to others.
The illusionist graphics maintain the illusion that you can see all there is to be seen. And within the current trend in rendering and display technologies and the ability to look at any game object from any angle, it is the prevalent paradigm - because it would be humiliating to admit that there are limits to things that the graphics engine can represent visually. The graphics engine is the device of the objective truth of the game world. Markku Eskelinen, everyone's favorite extreme ludologist, describes this (in one of his most inspired moments) as some kind of military ideology: everything can be consistently seen (in a constant level of detail) and mapped with the world divided into several "zones". It is indeed militaristic given that it is the ideal form of expression for first person shooters - in which you need to SEE in order to survive. There's no time for fuzziness or fancy.

Some video game genres, however, tend to contain complex storylines enacted within the game, and those are for most part adventure games and RPGs. The complexity of the worlds makes it incredibly hard for the developers to elaborate the game world visually in a constant level of detail. And there are basically two ways of dealing with this.
One of them is editing. It works really well in adventure games. In Secret Of The Monkey Island, for example, it would be unsustainable to draw the graphics of the whole game world on the same level of detail as the main locations have. That's where the bird-eye-view maps come in, on which the main character is represented by nothing more than a microscopic dot. When the "moving around" part is foregrounded and the "interaction with close surroundings" part is backgrounded in the gameplay, the change of perspective follows. The game thus presents the player with two or more cohesive, but distinct views of the world.
Another way of editing is the synecdoche effect many adventure games players are familiar with: representing a certain setting in a fictional game world by just a part of it. To give a fairly recent example, in the Abe Lincoln Must Die part of the new Sam & Max series, you are able to enter the White House - but the only room you can get to is the Oval Office. The Oval Office stands for the whole White House and it is the place where the action is. There is no explicit explanation of that, it's just a convention. As you enter the White House, you go directly to the Oval Office. This space inconsistency is enabled by the fact the gameplay is localized to certain spots in the game world and there have to be no "common laws of physics" valid across the boundaries of the game locales.
In the more space-conscious games of the yester-year, the space is preserved at the expense of visual detail. The lack of visual information is then compensated by hybridized code, or in other words, by augmentation by written language. It's no big news that language is an incredibly powerful medium, capable of not only compensating for missing visuals, but bringing in new information as well. Let's take a look at Wizardry VII: Crusaders Of The Dark Savant, a 1992 psychedelic RPG that uses a lot of written language by the virtue of being a "fantasy role-playing simulation". Pretty much all of the graphics in this game is just a basic rendering of the game map made out of floor and wall tiles (plus monsters and NPCs). There are four sets of these, which is enough to distinguish an "underground" locale, "town", "forest" and "cave", but not enough to distinguish between the "throne room" and the "storage room". The visual representation is more a representation of "the map" of the world in the indexical sense: it helps you locate yourself, gives you to structural backbone of the environment. The fictional gameworld is distinguished and described in further detail in the third-person "dungeon master" narrative:























This way, you can build a huge game without enslaving whole nations to draw graphics for you. And when the writing is good, you can actually smell the places you go to. This it not to say this illustrationist approach was common to all CRPGs of that time - Lands Of Lore, for example, went on to visualize as much as it could.
In the next generation of Western CRPGs, there seemed to be a tendency to concentrate the writing into the dialogs. The late 90's Infinity Engine games such as Baldur's Gate and Planescape: Torment offered a pre-rendered environment in a fixed-angle top-down view. This gave a good overview of the general situation, but left a lot of space for the player's fancy in terms of the looks and gestures of the characters, and could not really capture minute details. Planescape: Torment, widely considered to be the pinnacle of digital game storytelling and a game of deep philosophical insight, is an incredibly text-heavy RPG. In fact, you don't get to SEE the most interesting stuff in the game. You just READ about it. The game designers simply abused the Infinity Engine dialog box to include not only dialogs, but also memories, thoughts, object interaction and environment description. The story is bursting out of the engine, because it is too strong and complex to be captured by it. In the illustrationist manner, the game world itself existed (in a way) prior to the game, as it is a licensed product, and it is simply too weird for any graphics engine to do justice to it.













Now, I know that the much of the gaming industry operates based on a projected target audience with short to no attention spans, but by giving up on written text, many contemporary games just lose a lot of their expressive potential. It is strange that the narrative non-diegetic voice has been abolished, while other non-diegetic elements (HUDs, gameplay information) have been retained. Because of this, the assumption that videogames remediate the visual politics of film (which is largely illusionist, but does not usually contain any extradiegetic visual information) is not so clear and obvious.
Good storytelling in the illusionist visual paradigm CAN be done, and Bioshock could be an example - but in Bioshock, the world is insular, there are no NPCs and not much variety in the player character's actions (which is not to say it is not an excellent game).
But to fit a sizable world to this paradigm takes a lot of effort - and still it cannot be done in a consistent way. The Witcher, on one hand, tries to maintain the illusionist view, never resorting to non-diegetic narrative and being spatially consistent. But when it comes to dialogues, the fictional world's story is, again, stronger than the engine. This time, the contents of the dialogue are directly contradicting the visual representation (in the previous examples the verbal information rather added up to build a complete picture). I cannot see the chemist performing the mixing, because this character animation is not in the graphics assets of the game. But why do I see him doing something different? Instead of seeing a detailed, realistic representation of something ELSE, wouldn't it be better to just see his portrait and a read/hear a verbal description of what he is doing? I think it would, paradoxically, contribute to the suspension of disbelief.
I still think that The Witcher is an awesome game (there is drug dealing, vampire prostitutes and ex-lycanthropic girlfriends, mind you!), but it strikes me as a game that would benefit from a third-person narrative. That is not to say I am an interactive fiction advocate - I find pure text adventures just too hard to find my bearings in - but I believe that language can express so many things in one sentence that would take hundreds of artist-hours to visualize. Take T. S. Eliot's "streets that follow like a tedious argument / of insidious intent", for example. Do we shut ourself off settings like this by insisting on the fact everything in the game must be seen in 3D?

THE ORIGINAL WORKING CLASS HEROES: Miners, plumbers, trashmen in early 80's games

There has been a lot of articles on gender and race in video games, but has anyone investigated the representation of class? As far as I know, the answer is no. You might say: "What class system do Green Elves have, anyway?" Or, in a more scholarly fashion: "Class is a shaky concept anyway, different from one country to another." You would be right, and yes, I am going to be comfortably vague about the definition of what is working class.
Nevertheless, browsing through my library of early 80's British games, I have found out that there is a substantial share of video game characters that have mundane, hard, exhausting, and generally unenviable jobs. I am not going to say that the proto-game industry was more nice, fair and caring. I see it as an opportunity to explore the relationship between hard-core and casual games, and between technology, game design and content, of which character design is an essential part. It's also an excuse to rant about miner Willy and that I cannot miss.
But let me start with a 1983 British hit, Trashman, featuring you (you can name the character yourself) as a trashman going down the street, collecting trash and getting fired ruthlessly if you are not fast enough. By the way, the advert that's displayed on screen before the gameplay starts reads:

"SITUATION VACANT
Trashman required: must be alert, nimble footed and able to hold his drink."

When you're not fast enough, the following announcement shows up:















The subordination and the class distinctions between the main character and the people who live on the street is further emphasized by the fact that stepping on the grass, and therefore violating their property, makes you run out of time more rapidly. However, if you don't step on the grass, the benevolent house-owners invite you in for a funny chat and give you bonus time. Ian Bogost would probably call this a procedural argument about subservience. Overall, this game offers a good deal of social realism. In retrospect, the people on retro gaming forums are aware of its uniqueness and also Britishness:

"Only the British could make a game about collecting trash, but with the correct humour it pulls it off superbly. Very original and playable, I recommend a blast of this, don't forget to pop in to get the tips! " - Fizza on the C64 Lemon Forum

But the trashman wasn't the only one. Released in 1983 for Sinclair ZX Spectrum, the pioneering platformer game Manic Miner saw the debut of the extraordinary Willy. (Meanwhile, in the mushroom kingdom, Mario changed his profession from carpenter to plumber.) 1984 marked the debut of another English working-class hero, mechanic Wally Week, in the action-adventure game Pyjamarama. In one of the sequels, he was joined by a troupe of other struggling characters, including Tom the punk rocker and Harry the hippie. Another hero, an antropomorphic mole named Monty, appeared in a series of adventure platformers, including Monty On The Run from 1985, in which he tries to escape the police who are chasing him after he took part in a miners' strike (!). This was quite topical, given that 1984 was the year of the ill-fated miners' strikes all over Britain. Today, it sounds like an inspiration for a socially aware serious game. Back then, it was fun, and a relative blockbuster.
These games were huge hits, and although they originated on the Spectrum, the premier UK platform, conversions for other major home computers appeared in no time.

The limited graphic capabilities of early consoles and computers made everything look like a jerky bunch of pixels, which was alright for starship science-fiction (the future is made out of pixels, anyway) or abstract games. But if tiny characters appeared, they could hardly be taken seriously - even the cover art was usually cartoony.
Of all the games mentioned aboved, only Trashman, the scruffy forerunner of the Diner Dashes of today, uses the actual procedure of the job as game design foundation. In the other three games, the game mechanics could pretty much accomodate any character. Jumping around as Mario or Miner Willy could be the same as jumping around with a train conductor or an orchestra conductor. None of their profession-specific skills are used in the game. The choice of characters and monsters was rather arbitrary, although the introduction of the miners and assorted mole people had one game design motivation. That was the fact that the game world was divided into a series of "caverns", closed-off one-screen levels, that were a perfect fit for the underground dwellers.
In Jet Set Willy, a sequel to Manic Miner, Willy is suddenly elevated to high society, because he got rich after finding all the treasures guarded by evil telephones and vicious toilets of the first game. This time, he is wandering through his huge mansion, cleaning up the mess after his "new-found friends" who came to his party. Needless to say, the gameplay hasn't changed much. What changed is Willy's attire: instead of hard hat he has a top-hat.
An interesting class-related narrative element appears, though: the objective of the game is to (once again!) collect all the trash so that Willy's housekeeper Maria lets him to his bedroom. Here, a working-class character makes the miner-gone-socialite perform the same actions as in the original game. It is no surprise that the voluptuous Maria was interpreted by many gamers who did not read the story that came with the original copy of the game as Willy's wife - and that after collecting all the mess, he will be rewarded by some adult fun.
The crazy surrealism of the Willy and Monty Mole games only highlight the down-to-earth, gritty look of the Wally Week games. In the action-adventure game1 Everyone's A Wally, the background art is detailed enough to resemble a small and rather poor British town. In this game, the "gang" of five characters (including a toddler) have to crack safe and get the money. They are not criminals, though - they are a family. And although the game is supposed to be funny (there was even a cheesy comedy song on the flip side of the cassette tape - call it "multi-media"2), the very fact that you're assisting an impoverished family in their criminal pursuits is disturbing, in an exhilirating way.


















As the time went on, working-class characters started to disappear from games for both Spectrum and other platforms. Mario seems to be the only surviving blue-collar gaming icon, worth billions and franchised into infinity. He is an incredibly distinct and well-designed character, no doubt about it, but right now, he is probably the only video game icon who has had a real job. Real-life activities moved into the casual games category with predecessors like the 80's hits Trashman, Burgertime, Cookie, Tapper or Paperboy and recent hits like Diner Dash or Cooking Mama.
Thinking about the reasons, we come across an interesting thing: all the Willys, Wallys and Montys (and Trashman, too) cannot attack, let alone destroy, the monsters (or bloodthirsty household appliances) that threaten them. They are basically powerless. Can you see the Marxist implications?
It would be foolish to design a character with a weapon that cannot be used. If a game is designed with no weapons in mind, harmless Mario (let's forget the jumping part for now) can do the job. But as the requirements on interactivity with environment went up, the characters that just avoid the danger were replaced with those can actively fight against it. Eventually, hard-core games went on to be associated with guys with guns, and orcs, war or both. Serious business.
That was the case with the British 8-bit industry, too. Although it retained some of its domestic, modest and humorous appeal, around 1986, working-class heroes gave way to fantasy, science-fiction and military heroes almost completely3. The follow-up to Trashman bombed, Wally Week went for a jungle adventure out of the ordinary in Three Weeks In Paradise, which marked the end of the series. Monty Mole was dropped and later, his publisher, Gremlin Graphics, gave birth to the offshoot company Core Design, creators of the aristocratic wonder woman Lara Croft4. Good bye, working-class heroes. Or maybe, see you in a casual game. And bring your tools with you.

1)The action-adventure genre was basically a multi-screen platformer with the possibility to carry objects and use them at the right spots. It is often omitted from the adventure game histories, although it shares the essential puzzle-solving element.
2)The affordance of cassette tape as a data medium was the fact that it could include audio without any fancy digitization.
3)Of course, there were also animal heroes and various kinds of blob and jelly.
4)In this little article, I do not intend to criticize representation of class in contemporary games.

YOU BURNOUTS ROTTING IN FRONT OF YOUR COMPUTERS!: Cult of the Superhardcore Gamer in Czech Gaming Culture

It's not unusual to see gamers discuss how many frags they have scored, to which level they have advanced and what mysteries they have unravelled. The feeling of achievement makes a many gamer's life worthwhile. But there are gamers for whom gaming is a serious commitment, a calling, an obsession. They hunger. They hunger for more and more games to finish, preferrably on an Iron Man difficulty setting.
Now, they seem to be relegated to forums of particular games, although, yes, there hasn't been much research on this phenomenon. But there was a time and place, probably one of many, where the superhardcore gameslayer was a shared and articulated fantasy of a larger gaming community. I say fantasy, because it was hard (as if somebody tried) to distinguish between real achievements and tall tales, between a gamer's life and a hallucination induced by too many hours of staring into the screen. There were gamers entering the realm of legend because of their "contribution" to gaming, there were fictional narratives of gaming ecstasies and gaming addiction, of people who took their calling too far. And most interestingly, there was a word describing a superhardcore gamer, a seriously dedicated gamer, in contexts of both fantasy and real life. The word, "pařan", was derived from the verb meaning "to steam". Welcome to the Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic of the early 90's.












The cult of the pařan originated in the discourse sparked by the early Czech gaming magazine Excalibur. Its suggestions of a very specific, emotional relationship to the gamer's computer (more than a particular game), hinted at a Gibsonian cyborg-like coupling of man and machine(1). Gamers' Atari ST's, Amigas and PC's were called "darlings" or "precious ones", promptly invoking the Gollum metaphor.
In a hilarious article called "How To Die In Front Of Your Computer", an Excalibur writer countered a mainstream critique of computer games with a jokingly meant article on how to be a "real pařan". He writes:

"Do not let anybody disturb you. As soon as you come from school or work, immedialtely turn on your computer (or, better, do not turn it off at all) and load your favorite game. Do not answer phone or doorbell. Do not go to the bathroom at all – you could have done that at work! Newbies should play at least until midnight, advanced gamers need not sleep at all. On weekends, pařans must stay at their monitors non-stop.

While playing, sit in the most uncomfortable position possible. This way, you can better identify with the game's main hero – he does not feel comfortable, either!

Never air your room! If you can, put your computer into a windowless room. It should be warm, hard to air and smell dank and stale. That's how you make for a real pařan atmosphere."

There indeed were and are gamers who, to a certain extent, follow these rules. No wonder that, in Score, the early 90's Czech gaming magazine (and likewise in the 80's British press), the ultimate quality of a game was its power to make a gamer sacrifice family life, social life and health. That's total immersion, that's leaving your body behind.
"You'll forget about your pink teddy bear, about your grandma and the urge to go to the bathroom. There will be only you and System Shock," said the review of System Shock in late 1994. Another "life-altering" game, the Sierra adventure Quest for Glory, is described as so addictive that once you start playing, "it goes fast: an hour or two, a sandwich or two, a divorce or two, a grave – just one..." (The same review addressed the readers as "you burnouts rotting in front of your computers", ironically reappropriating the language of their parents.)

In one of the letters to the magazine, a reader confesses:

"They call me Coffeebean and I am the wife of the great pařan that goes by the name of Broken Stick. [...] My husband has been immersed in playing games, Doom specifically, for several months now. [...] In his greatest pařan ecstasies, he jumps out of the window, just in his slippers, and beats our dog Azor with a broom. [...] Recently, he's been telling me my head has 4 feet in diameter. [...] Is there a way of suing id Software for ruining my life? Yours truly, Coffeebean.”

Of course it is all exaggeration, but still, it is now the rhetoric I'm after, not reality.
This is too Monty Python to be true, but note the word "ecstasy". Hardcore gaming is far beyond entertainment.
Although the stories mentioned above all happened in the realm of fantasy, there were real pařan legends, too. If they'd lived in Czechoslovakia, the heroes of King of Kong might have been among them. But Eastern Europe has always been a home computer rather than console or arcade gaming region, so the gaming legends claim that they "turned the score over in Jet Pac(2)" or that they "can walk through first levels of Doom, blindfolded" instead. This discourse of achievement made for a community that, although unrestricting and decidedly unserious, offered an accomplishment-based hierarchy.
Given it was a computer gaming subculture, there was always a huge emphasis on the technical skills and the mastery of many platforms. The advancement through the evolving computer environment and the experience of "beating the medium" (oh, games are the probably the only medium you can beat) in the very process of its making were an essential part of the more real-life pařan figures. The early adopters and the technologically priviliged, those who knew how turn a new technology into pleasure, were a step closer to the pařan-dom.
When the Score magazine, the best-selling gaming magazine and premier pařan outlet, decided to stop using the word pařan and the whole pařan rhetoric in its 13th issue, the editor-in-chief (himself a bigger pařan than anybody else) intended it as a step away from the fantasy of total dedication, towards a more "mature" attitude. He also wanted to reach out to the non-hardcore audience. Upon this decision, the editorial staff even divided their real selves from their gaming selves by discarding their gaming nicknames (used as authors' names) in favor of real names. But the myth was so deeply grounded in the gaming community that people were afraid of losing their status and the value of their accomplishments along with the signifier. A reader complained:

“Today, a child says 'I want' and gets a computer, finishes a game with a walkthrough and cheats and calls himself a pařan. He is not one, but what about those who worked themselves up step by step on programmable calculators, ZX Spectrum, Amiga and PC to be first-class gamers, aren't they pařans? They mastered mouse and joystick, crosshair and two-handed axe, magic and strategy, dialects of English and Norton Utilities? Aren't they pařans?!”

This was back in the day when many, mainly computer, games apparently weren't meant to be finished and their mindless difficulty renders them unplayable for a contemporary gamer - whereas now you quite often "sit through" a game rather than struggle with it. That might be the reason why pařandom was so precious to this reader.
It also explains why the "real-life", hierarchical, achievement-based element of hard core gaming was so central to the community, whereas the fantasy element probably originated as opposition through pleasure, as an immersion in a brand new meta-gaming world that included not only the games themselves, but the game of gaming, the whole digital space that was suddenly available and ready to be explored. And beaten.

1 While talking about computers with affection, do we use the mundane word computer anymore? Or do we switch to something more primal and powerful, something that doesn't remind us of the anemic office space?

2 I. e. running out of digits used to keep the score, and thereby reverting it back to zero. Not easy in Jet Pac, one of the most famous Sinclair ZX Spectrum games.

The screenshot comes from Bloodnet.

PURGATORY BLUES: I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream As A Game Of Moral Decision-Making

I have recently joined an interesting bunch of people from the Gambit MIT Game Lab and The Berkman Center For Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, who meet at informal sessions and try to find ways in which games can portray complex issues, such as empathy or moral and ethical decisions. Most of the games that are often brought up as succesful in pulling this off are mentioned below. But to show that ideas like this have been out there for a long time, I set out to do a little presentation on one of my favorite adventure games. The following article/whatever is based on the presentation, the follow-up discussion and it addresses some questions raised at previous meetings. Once the yet unnamed group starts its own blog (soon!), I will edit it and move it there and link to it from here.

Thinking about games that portray the complexity of human emotion and ethical and moral choices, we often find out that these issues come as little surprises hidden beneath the surface. No matter if they are included to enhance the narrative, immersion, the player's experience or because the creators just felt like doing it, the games usually do not wear it on their sleeve. This was the case with Ultima IV and is the case with Bioshock. And even though Planescape: Torment offered a wonderfully crafted personal narrative of exploration of one's soul, it was still marketed as a D&D fantasy adventure. This might also be the best way to introduce these topics, as the players do not feel like the matters of “great importance” are forced upon them. But there has been a commercial game that had moral and ethical choices as its very driving concept. It was the 1995 PC CD-ROM graphic adventure I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream, based on Harlan Ellison's story of the same (brilliant) name, produced as a joint venture between the production companies Cyberdreams and Dreamer's Guild. Since its release, the medium of videogame has come a long way, and this is a good moment to reassess Ellison's ambitions.














Prior to the release, Harlan Ellison, who took active part in creating the game, even voice acting the main villain, explicitly stated that he wanted to create a game in which the player had to make ethical and moral choices. Judging from the fact that both of these companies were not heard from since shortly after the release of the game, one might suggest that it was a failed experiment. It was, in some respects, but in revealed a whole range of expressive possibilities of the videogame medium, although it wasn't really able to utilize them.
The story is built around five characters tormented post-apocalypse by a military supercomputer named AM, who hates all humanity. These five people are the last bastion of humanity. Or are they? All of them have to revisit their fears and guilt-stricken memories. Originally conceived by AM as another form of torture, these journeys can be used against him in an attempt to defeat him by restoring the characters' humanity and thus finding weaknesses in AM's program.
Using a traditional SCUMM-styled point-and-click interface, the player navigates the characters in environments supposedly generated by AM. Most of the content is delivered via voice-acted dialogues. After going through the story of each of the five characters, the player might use the temporary loss of stability in AM's systems to overpower him. But Harlan Ellison is fast to warn that the game cannot be won. To cite the sadly unreferenced Wikipedia article on the game, “to preserve the story's nightmarish mood, Ellison wanted to create a game that players could not possibly win. Instead, there would be a variety of ethical ways in which way they could lose. There are ways to lose heroically, gloriously and at the peak of one's humanity -- if players do well. Otherwise, there are ways to lose ignominiously, in a selfish, cowardly, frightened manner. Dying alone, and in terror. Or being tortured eternally.”
At our "morality in games" sessions, we have often discussed the difficulty of making moral choices in games matter and the assertion was made that the relationship between the “moral” choice in the fictional world of the game is often tied to the desire to win the game, which usually leads to making the obviously “right” choices without really thinking about them. No winning option is an interesting design concept, altough its implementation in this game didn't make it justice.
The game features a soldier led to regret the harsh treatment of his subordinates, a strong woman who nevertheless cannot overcome the terrible experience of being raped, a man who sent his wife to a mental hospital instead of taking care of her, a fake and selfish hypocrite, and a former Nazi doctor, a disciple of Mengele, the angel of death.
The micro-narratives bring up two metaphors used to convey morality issues – that of purgatory (reliving one's sins in isolation from the rest of the world) and moral rediscovery. The rediscovery concept was used to great effect in Planescape: Torment. In both games, player characters are bound to face their forgotten past after a state of amnesia, often making a horrible discovery. This is potentially a very powerful ludic device of conveying the feelings of guilt or misery.
Although most of the game is subtler, I will try to demonstrate the game's pros and cons on the story of Nimdok, the Nazi doctor. He revisits the site of his crimes against humanity, having lost most of his memories and only slowly realizing what he did in the past. These screenshots show him puzzled after his arrival at the concentration camp:


























He is bound to confront his former self and the player chooses whether he will stay on the track of a cruel and brutal scientist or whether he will take a different path and save the “Lost tribe”, which is obviously a metaphor of Jews. The choices the player makes in Nimdok's case are rather obvious. He or she can have him perform a useless and ruthless operation on a young kid, or not (the interesting thing is that if he choses not to, doctor Mengele will do it instead, which emphasizes the hopelesness even more). Once he activates the Golem, he can either have him destroy the Lost Tribe or turn him over to the Tribe. All in all, every micro-narrative can be finished in several ways and all paths to lead to some kind of overall conclusion. The way the characters have dealt with their respective stories has an effect on the final stage, in which they confront AM.
The game's greatest achievement is that it meant (or could have meant) a major breakthrough in terms of what content may be tackled in a commercial videogame. A game explicitly addressing ethical issues is extremely rare, and this one even offered to play as both a criminal and a victim, in case of Ellen, the only female character. No matter whether the game mechanics actually capture – or induce – the mental processes of empathy, morality and guilt, it at least makes you see the points in one's life where these choices can be made and make you think about them. The game's surreal visuals, abstraction-heavy dialogues, deeply disturbing topics (cannibalism, rape, total war and more) and all-around weirdness nevertheless turned out to become a rare exception rather than a new standard.
There were at least two clever design choices: The fact that stories were set in a fantastic enviroment enabled metaphorical puzzles and events, such as one of the characters literally taking his heart and feeding it to a jackal. The inability to reach a “real” winning situation might have brought in some moral ambiguity which is a prerequisite of moral reasoning.
And this is where the shortcomings begin: The players are pretty much bound to Harlan Ellison's take on morality, as the game interface signals whether you have made a “good” or a “bad” choice (in a later attempt at a morality game, Bullfrog's Fable, the main character's avatar changed accordingly). This “spiritual barometer” more or less leads to the reduction of a moral choice to a gameplay choice. And although you cannot win, there is still a most desirable outcome that might not be winning in terms of the narrative, but still is in terms of the rule system and “getting the most out of the game”. Another difficulty stems from the fact that the players don't have any opportunity to emphatize with the characters before they find out about their past. This bogs down the immersion factor. While playing Nimdok's story, I often found myself stuck between two choices: either role-playing him and staying true to his former self, or betraying his character and making him “good”. The narrative of the game doesn't do a good job portraying his change from a brutal monster to a potentially repenting man.
Other drawbacks include technical issues (laggy, unresponsive interface), aesthetic choices (out-of-place cartoony animation) and gameplay elements (puzzles bordering between unconventional and silly). The graphics are, of course, outdated, and the third-person perspective is probably not the best choice for a soul-searching narrative. The whole idea of building a highly original and meditative game on an engine used to play story- and inventory-based adventures is questionable, although adventure games seem to be (or rather have been, as they are extinct as a commercially viable genre) most open to left-field content. But even though flawed, it is still an enjoyable game that screams “These ideas shouldn't go unnoticed” on every corner. Too bad it did not have a proper mouth.

In terms of Different Gaming, this game is interesting in two respects. In German and French versions, the Nimdok part of the narrative was very crudely taken out not to upset the censors, without eliminating all the references to him. As contributors to the ScummVM project (which runs this and some other adventure games' binaries on various platforms, making it amazingly portable) have noticed, these two versions cannot be finished up to the “desired” ending. This naturally sucks, but can be interpreted as an unintended meta-commentary: Without bringing all the characters together, even if it is the most sinful one that is missing, humanity cannot be redeemed.
In addition to that, in the Czech Republic, the game was lifted from obscurity by a budget reissue translated into Czech by Andrej Anastasov, a prominent games journalist, gaming legend and a proponent of “adult” (read: complex) themes in computer entertainment. In the U.S., the game can be purchased directly from Harlan Ellison for $32. That's an unusual price for 12-year-old software, but then again, this game is kind of unique.

Intermezzo: ON GAMES AND CUPCAKES

My lack of posting during the last two weeks was due to being busy finishing an article on media change for my Prague university. Thinking about what it is that transforms a technology into a medium, I discarded the idea of having a clear-cut categorial definition of any medium and media in general, because each medium gets to the point of being treated as medium following a different trajectory. Is there any abstraction abstract enough to cover all kinds of media we know, including videogames, theme parks and culinary media*?

Then I remembered that, at a party I'd gone to a couple of weeks ago, I had jokingly proposed studying cupcake as a medium. Surely, we could do that, if we projected the particular cupcake against the general cupcake-ness and found a meaning in the way it differs from other cupcakes - if we consumed it for or took from it more than just nutrition. It might be an "I-love-you" cupcake or an "I-love-strawberries" cupcake. It is a thought deeply rooted in the good old structuralism, but hey, I come from the university of Jakobson (pre-MIT) and Trubetzkoy, a place where de Saussure is the primer.
Is it then not the social acknowledgment of meaningfulness of difference, that establishes the medium? It works like that with language, which is a medium, too.
And that is what annoys many gamers about the "content-blind" criticism of videogames - the inability of treating games as individual works rather than the lump of medium as a whole. This en-masse criticism of "suspicious" media crippled the development of comics in the 1950's and is indicative of all power-based media criticism. It might be ridiculous to look for meanings in cupcakes, but in order to criticize them, I must get to the point where the nuances of taste and cupcake design are more than random patterns hitting the interface**.

I know this is far from gaming discourse. Next time I will be focusing on the dead (or hibernating?) genre of point and click adventures and the communities that keep it alive. Or at the reasons why interactive fiction failed to remain a major force. Or the origins of the discourse on game "addictiveness".

*Sadly, this term probably does not exist.
**Here, I am without any doubt influenced by Matt Weise's thesis on meaningfulness in videogames.

MATTHEW SMITH: THE MANIC GAME DESIGNER

Last time, I discussed how we see a game designer in the context of the studio system. I set out to examine whether the perception of game designers was different at a time when they made their games alone, locked away in isolation, staring at prehistoric radiation-heavy monitors or TV screens and programming the legendary classics in machine code, thus intimately familiar with the machine's circuitry.
Next day, by convenient coincidence, I got a message from a friend with a link to an English-language blog run by a Czech game-designer-turned-film-critic, further linking to a YouTube video featuring the inscrutable and long-lost mythical hero of the British game industry, Matthew Smith.



Before launching into tabloid sensationalism and biographical detail, let us look at the very beginning of the film clip. The modern-day British journalist acknowledges the supremacy of the U.S. and Japan in the videogame industry of that day. It is important to bear in mind that the modest, largely home-brew and profoundly nerdy early eighties British games industry was a slightly isolated world with its own weird platform (ZX Spectrum) and a community feel expressed by the gaming magazines such as Your Sinclair or the aptly-named Crash. Thanks to the wide availability of the computer and the fact it was NOT a console, anybody could join the programming ranks and gain fame and respect. The magazines featured game designer inteviews almost every month, and at a very personal level (they described Dave Perry, later of Earthworm Jim fame, as "endowed with all the native charm that one would expect of a man with pure Celtic blood flowing through his veins").

And what about Matthew Smith? He was a prodigy, a 17-year-old kid neatly fitting all the programmer-guy stereotypes: geeky, strange, and with a bad haircut. The old footage shows him as the author of the acclaimed Manic Miner, a wonderfully balanced and surreal game that defined what the ZX Spectrum platform would be capable of. After making a hugely succesful sequel, Jet Set Willy, the young programmer vanished into thin air (watch the clip for details).
But even before his disappearance, he was considered alien. He was too good to be true. The May 1984 issue of Crash magazine brings up uncanny hints at the guy's non-existence: "There were rumours that Matthew Smith was a figment of the Liverpool computing mass psyche [...] There were rumours that Matthew Smith didn’t really exist." The review of Jet Set Willy ends with another eerie statement: "Jet Set Willy is a high point in the development of the Spectrum game. I hope there will be others, maybe ones of a different kind, but I’m sure nothing will top this game for addictivity, fluent graphics, responsiveness and sheer imagination. The nightmare quality of the events suggests its author should be receiving therapy. Instead, he’s probably getting rich. Good luck to him..."
The sheer imagination led Matthew to, of all places, a Dutch hippie commune and druggy oblivion. Manic Miner fans set up a website reporting his sightings. Isn't that familiar? Remember Syd Barrett of Pink Floyd, an artist damaged by LSD, trapped in youth, naivete and craziness? His fans did the same thing. As "brhodes0" puts it in the YouTube comments section: "If you look at the stuff he came out with age 17, the psychedelic images... then combine it with the drugs. Well it's good he's kind of recovered, a top bloke." Barrett never recovered, though.
Smith became a legend for one more reason. By fleeing the programming world and doing crazy things, he completely shook off the programmer stereotype and became elusively fascinating. The fact that he was instrumental in establishing the British gaming industry made the contrast between his exploits and his post-fame life even more striking. And, well, he does not seem to remember much of his post-fame life.
Looking back at his old games, Smith says: "Ten years after I was a history, twenty years after, I am a legend." That is especially true in the British ZX Spectrum fan community, which is one of the most active retro-gaming groups, remaking old classics and taking them onto the web - you can even play Jet Set Willy online. And when there is community, there is myth.

FAERIE NINJA FAN BOY

It is so cool to start your blog entry with a reference to what you have just heard Henry Jenkins say in his class at MIT. (As if he did not touch on the topic of his academic celebrity status and the fact that his name is being attached to everything CMS, for better or worse; now I'm attaching it to my puny blog.) We mainly discussed authorship, the way it shapes our interpretation of the text, and, briefly, the way authorship is assigned to texts. And Henry Jenkins pointed out that in the field of videogames, we constructed a figure of the game designer but the matter is still not sorted out. By that time, I had been already thinking about it. About who's the author, who we adore, what is considered a personal achievement in videogames...

A faerie ninja made me think about it.

On Monday, I checked the schedule of Alice Robison's excellent all-MIT class on videogame theory and found out that Linda Currie (née Sirotek) was coming to give a talk.
Wow!, thought I - for the following reasons: a) she co-designed and produced one of my all-time favorite games, Wizardry 8, the sequel to the Crusaders game mentioned in the last blog entry; b) for me, she became the symbol of the whole Wizardry series, through which she had worked her way, first (1981!) as an involuntary help-line operator, subsequently as a producer and designer. She simply was THERE and, as a fan, I wish I had seen what she saw - "the making of" the legend. And even if Wizardry is now largely and sadly forgotten, it had a unique twist, a distinct, quirky and unpredictable personality, that elevated it high above your average sword'n'sorcery hack'n'slash. One of the funniest things was the fact that fans intentionally played the game with weakest possible characters "to get more fun out of it", often opting for Faerie Ninjas, an absurd and legendary race-class combination; c) she carried the tradition as long as she could, making the beautiful swan song which is Wizardry 8, a testament of (I would say) her own fandom of the series; d) she's half-Czech!
After an entertaining discussion with her and her colleague Scott MacMillan, I asked her a few fan questions and was on my way home. But making my way through a half-lit MIT corridor, I realized that I cannot just leave. I am a fan. Fans do certain kinds of things. Music fans get their records signed (I do!). Star fans get their... whatever signed. But what should I do? I found myself in utter lack of games-specific cultural knowledge I could utilize. I didn't bring a copy of the game. I knew this was a special and great moment of my fan life and that I had to do something about it. But still I felt strange asking Alice to take a picture of me and Linda. I just din't know whether this is the way it is done.
In the tradition of aca-fandom (though I'm probably more fan than aca), I started to explore, why it felt new; what constitutes my fandom and its relationship to authorship, art and the medium. First of all, I had a hard time thinking about with whom else I would like to have a picture taken. John Carmack? That's an engineer, great, but I guess not exciting in the fan way. Chris Avellone of the Planescape: Torment fame? As much as I loved his game (very much!), I didn't really know anything about this guy until I've read a recent interview. To be honest, I'm quite surprised I could still remember his name. Sorry, but that's how the gaming discourse goes. Ron Gilbert? Maybe. Maybe I would be disappointed should I find out he's not as funny as Monkey Island is.
Although I am a fan of games, I cannot usually see myself as a fan of their authors. Are there Peter Molyneux fans in the way there are David Lynch fans? Are there Richard Garriot fans, or just Ultima fans? I can imagine people respect the game designers. In Smartbomb, Heather Chaplin and Aaron Ruby describe the cautiously respectful way young designers act towards Will Wright and Shigeru Myamoto. They are celebrities, but in their own circle, more like say famous architects than pop musicians or Hollywood directors, although their work is a part of the popular culture. They don't tour, they just make their scarce appearances at gaming expos and conferences. Chaplin and Ruby do give examples of gaming industry people like Cliff Bleszinski, who try to play the role of gaming-world rock stars. Yet an ordinary player won't connect the games he plays with CliffyB's name and face. But maybe I am wrong and you can correct me.
Game is also a collective work, making it harder to think of it as an authored work, but so is film. Even film pushes the credits to a place where people can choose whether to skip them or not, and credits in games are usually made to be skipped and are not a part of the game as such. Maybe the reason for the disconnedtion stems from our perception of games as software, as industrial, technical products, blueprinted, designed, refined, tested, burnt onto CDs, packaged and published, just like spreadsheets. We are probably still at the beginning of the process of establishing our relationship to games as an expressive medium (or to reference Henry Jenkins again, a "lively art"). Unlike films, each game is a technology of its own, not only a manifestation of technology, and game designers stay virtually anonymous, being "technicians" whose power is to know, not to be known. The author is dead and we don't feel any urge to resurrect him, maybe because imagining him tinkering with world design might break our illusion of the virtual world's existence*.
This saves us some trouble with the interpretation, however, because, as we also heard in the class, our knowledge of the author always shapes the way we read her or his work. Most of my gaming experience is untinted by any thought of game designers. But hey, I am going to try out Wizardry 8 once more now, to see whether my interpretation has changed knowing that Linda Currie was a teenage hard-core RPG girl picking up phones and telling people what the gold key is for.

*It's also rather hard to create a whole world in one person (unless you are a god), which makes the intricate webs of texts like Lost the TV show a more team-based and also anonymous work (a collective god-ship?). It might be interesting to look at the way game authorship was treated at the time one or two people usually made the whole game. Hey, I could do that.