rolling thread of stuff worth reading on videogames

worth reading

i never played myst or any of its sequels or remakes

Me neither, but I've always found them/their success fascinating. The metanarrative about collective memory is the main hook of that article, for me.

PC was my only gaming platform through most of the 90s. I played and loved Myst/Riven, and doom/quake, and all the lucasarts games. Author is otm, the rewritten history of that period is a really odd and probably unhealthy thing.

Rebought Myst recently actually. Made a start, and man I've got no idea how I ever had the patience for it first time around. I finished this thing! More than once! With no walkthroughs!

Actually, I probably do know how I managed that - it was a combination of long empty school holidays and the nagging guilt of having convinced my dad to actually spend £50 on it. Almost all the games I played back then were pirates swapped with friends but we couldn't copy CDs then, so paying up was the only way to play Myst (which only added to its appeal tbh). Having made that unprecedented investment, there was no way I could justify giving up a couple of hours in.

In fairness though I don't remember actually wanting to give up either - the atmosphere of that place was so compelling, and it really did look amazingly *real* at the time, I think I was happy walking back and forth flicking switches until something happened, just because it felt like a nice place to be hanging out anyway.

yeah, cool article! could be more tightly edited but i like the big points about gamer metanarratives and their authorship. the inability for the canon to deal with the success of games that appear in the $9.95 bin near the exit at Staples, or even with things like successful catalog titles. the focus of all mags being the kind of "gamer" eager to drop fifty bucks on "gamer"-targeted titles the week of release, it's easy to overlook that in the aggregate, the game that may have blown the most minds in 1998 was.... myst, purchased for $9.95 at Staples. or whatever.

In fairness though I don't remember actually wanting to give up either - the atmosphere of that place was so compelling, and it really did look amazingly *real* at the time, I think I was happy walking back and forth flicking switches until something happened, just because it felt like a nice place to be hanging out anyway.

Yeah, I think this definitely gets at what made the game appealing and also possibly what makes it somewhat difficult to appreciate as much today. Graphics and especially sound design were truly top notch at the time, probably years ahead of what else was going on. I don't think too much thought was put into sound design for games at the time, the only other game from that era that I remember being impressed by on this front was Doom.

i was, and still am, easily taken by wandering-around-in-pleasant-places games. i spent hours in the buggy, insulting and generally awful Ultima 9 just climbing hills, swimming into grottos, and imagining life in Britannia. wouldn't play it now with a gun to my head, but while staying with friends a couple weeks ago i got to play a little bit of breath of the wild, and it was the same itch. pretty sure that if I actually owned it it would drive me nuts because most of the mechanics i encountered seemed really fussy and overcomplicated and within an hour i was having to remember what like twelve different buttons did in the main interface and in the menus. but for climbing hills and swimming around and admiring views from the top of ruined abbeys, it couldn't be better.

I love that article on Myst

Something about Myst that I remember very clearly was that it was an enormously popular game with girls and women. Not that my mom wasn't a Mario fan, or that my teachers wouldn't borrow a gameboy to play a game of Tetris at recess. But with Myst, I remember very clearly reading interviews with female public figures where they were eagerly talking about it. It felt like a watershed-- women were playing games with enthusiasm. It occurred to me that (aside from Roberta Williams) the development of games was largely a male enterprise-- and thus, the neurons that a game sought to stimulate were that of the male brain.

The article leans a lot on "violent content" as a symbol of "what makes a game male-oriented", but I think it's deeper than that, that it has to do with what a game is doing to you on a neurological level. Myst didn't come with instructions-- it was designed specifically to need none. There was no real goal, the beauty of the landscape was its own reward. It's non-objective gameplay, it was strictly world-building. You couldn't die, you could only get stuck-- and you'd still be stuck in this exquisitely rendered world.

It's impossible to really recreate in 2018 just how moving the images in the "slideshow" were, and the effectiveness of the world building. The 7th Guest contained too many anachronisms to be truly immersive. The graphical Zork games were not at all pretty. (The only game that was as successful at world-building as Myst, from around that time, as far as I'm concerned, were Jane Jensen's Gabriel Knight games.) And the reason why Myst's success cannot really be re-created directly is because the game's appeal was in the newness of the experience. The Sims is, as far as I'm concerned, the spiritual sequel to Myst. And Minecraft the spiritual sequel to The Sims. Games that aren't looking to capitalize on already existing subroutines that have been found to stimulate the brain "in a certain way that we have found to be saleable", but are creating new ways of stimulating the brain.

Like, when a Myst or a Candy Crush or an Angry Birds or a Two Dots takes off in popularity, and the competitive ""modern"" gaming scene shudders, they're missing the point of those games' success. It's about stimulation, not about content-- it is comparatively like novelists bemoaning the rise in popularity of crossword puzzles

animal crossing probably fits in there somewhere too

xxpost I would stop short of some of the essentializing male-brain part of that, but overall, you're definitely on to something. I think the style of Myst's puzzles is also significant to its crossover - while they were often baffling, it was clear what the puzzles were and where they were, and they were basically abstract (math and geometry and spatial relationships IIRC). The article compares them to the crossword puzzle but they might be closer to Sudoku (anachronistic comparison obv) in their disavowal of the need for either outside knowledge or, versus Zork, second-guessing of what the programmers imagined as a kooky creative left-field solution. It might be that Zork/Sierra/etc. appealed to a certain kind of nerdish emotional payoff - I'm so smart, I figured it out, I've outsmarted the game - that's subtly different from that of tinkering with little Towers of Hanoi or getting a gauge to add up to the right number with a mismatched set of switches.... but I could be reaching and/or misremembering how Myst actually played.

i was mostly PC in the 90s and i the day i bought DOOM II a friend bought Myst (both our first CD-ROM games) and i played a little of it. it just paled in comparison, instead of fluid textured 60fps it was just entirely still 2D images. the rendering didn't excite me the way Donkey Kong Country did either, it just looked like those random Computer Graphics VHS tapes (which are pretty cool and actually full motion). the aesthetic was very Beige. compared to something like DOTT or Sam N Max the art design put me to sleep.

it was certainly a huge deal and instrumental in breaking CD-ROMs. before this most games came on floppy, or were just regular games with CD soundtracks. this was a tech demo basically. also a cool puzzle game and independently developed, demonstrating you could have massive success with ambient games that are nonviolent in nature. just not for me.

we picked up 7th Guest, which was more goth, more my style. never played it for more than a few hours. the most interesting thing about those interactive CD-ROMs is the high level of kitsch in all the FMV segments. they are almost the 60s Roger Corman biker/monster movies of the 90s. revisiting the low budget low res video cheese of old titles like Sewer Shark or Night Trap, maybe having FMV Movie Nights, is going to be a big thing in the future 90s nostalgia cycles imo.

i suspect they overlap in aesthetics and in some cases maybe production equipment/personnel with 1980s direct-to-VHS horror movies and stuff like that. which of course have a corman lineage of their own.

that particular '90s nostalgia cycle is already happening, you should see the VHS swap meets going on. I go to a monthly series at my local Alamo Drafthouse, Video Vortex, that cherishes this stuff

Well, some people would prefer to explain statistics like these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_and_video_games#Genre_preferences as being a reflection of the game's content. I think it's neurological. As for that sub-category, "atmospheric exploration"-- I can't think of a game more suited than Myst to be credited with effectively creating that genre

i think myst's a pretty linear evolution from high infocom. certainly all the zorks except maybe beyond (but def zero) count as "atmospheric exploration"-- so do enchanter, planetfall, starcross etc. (and before infocom, colossal cave). suspect these games were played by a lot of women too.

the sierra/lucasarts/westwood/revolution games took their cues from the less exploratory, more linear stuff, full of npcs and jokes-- hitchhiker's, leather goddesses, sorcerer. (the first couple king's quests count as "exploratory" maybe but aren't v atmospheric.) and when zork first made the jump to real graphics (literally a week before myst) it was more like those (or like beyond zork) than it was like 1/2/3/0: full of fmv characters and inventory items. and maybe most importantly, its interface was full of contextual popup text commands chosen from menus-- more elegant than lucasarts SCUMM interfaces of its time imo, but not more than the refined eye/hand/mouth SCUMM in full throttle and curse of monkey island-- while myst popularized a seamless mode of interaction so much more native to graphical adventures that it was immediately adopted not just by all its ripoffs but by both subsequent graphical zork games. the fully appropriate newborn simplicity of "click on what you want to touch" was the graphical-adventure analogy to "the computer asks you what you want to do and you type a reply", but i think the latter was fully as "accessible" in its day (scaled down for the pre-macintosh, pre-cdrom era) and led a lot of women around a lot of desolate and eerie environments.

otm tho that just being in this otherworld, wandering around it when "stuck", is a/the major appeal in this and its precedents. myst understood this v well, which is why the box said MYST THE SURREALISTIC ADVENTURE THAT WILL BECOME YOUR WORLD.

dc is otm about the puzzles in myst, which are often v grounded and physical-- the best "ages" are designed around you figuring out how they "work" holistically-- i.e. directing the water flow in channelwood where you need it; or understanding the sound codes in whatever the world w the sound codes is called (btw i think the article above mentions that myst requires you to draw maps-- this is infamously a tell that the player did not understand the sound codes). however there are also plenty of codes gratuitously concealed in v strange places (planetarium roof, engraved plaques in power generator, distant horizon etc.) that without sinking to the 7th guest's level of I AM THE DEMENTED PUZZLEMASTER! WELCOME TO MY PUZZLEMANSION are not always exactly what you would call elegant.

what is elegant is riven, which is a stone masterpiece of eerie ruin exploration in which all puzzles and obstacles are fully integrated into the physical fiction, in which everything is about figuring out how the place works. the rightful heir to zork 2 or enchanter and hugely surpasses both. interesting to read that article on false late-90s memories of myst "killing" adventure games because of course what killed adventure games was the ridiculous excesses of the sierra/lucasarts model (williams+jensen always get blamed for this, but the strangely canonized the longest journey is a perfect example of decadence, as are all the monkey islands after... well take yr pick, and tbph as are the puzzles in grim fandango, to say nothing of the interface). if anyone had made a better game than riven the genre might have gone somewhere.

Great post

I never played Riven! I remember reading, when it came out, critical drubbings, and deciding not to sink my allowance into it.

I never thought about what "killed" the adventure game genre! But it's interesting to consider. For me, the extreme high-points in that format (Monkey Island, Tentacle, SQ3, KQ3) just were never surpassed by subsequent games. What was so good about the high-points was the lack of "rendered graphics" that made GK2 and KQ5 decidedly unlovely, the lack of speech that only created excruciating, spell-breaking loading times (SQ4, SQ5), really poor puzzle design (Sam & Max, Full Throttle). What was lost was fluidity. Even latter-day celebrants in the genre (Silent Hill 2, Monkey 3) felt clunky and inelegant. But man, those highs were high. SQ3 and Monkey Island are just amazing, and I don't think I've ever felt such a sense of accomplishment in a game as I did when I finally killed Manannan in KQ3

yeah kq3 is prob the unheralded sierra great. i'm biased tho cause it's the first computer game i can vividly remember arriving in our house, that fancy fancy box on the kitchen table, me not knowing how to pronounce "heir." i spent hours and hours and hours with that game. every environment is burned into my brain, it informed the way i thought crystal balls and the interiors of pirate ships should look, the way i thought rope ladders should unfurl from treehouses, a long-term affinity for orphan-raised-by-evil-wizard scenarios.... so great. even the bullshit of climbing up and down that mountain was worth it for how it enhanced the urgency of getting home before manannan returned - oh god i gotta stash this stuff under my bed and fast - and the triumph once you can come and go as you please. if you know what you're doing probably you can beat the whole game in like one trip down the mountain and back, but of course the first time through i lived out weeks and weeks of gwydion's sad little life. all the atmosphere a six- or seven-year-old could ever ask for.

i remember riven being mindblowing to me at the time, it's certainly an improvement on myst

grim fandango ended up winning me over once they rereleased it with modern controls, that's probably my favorite game in the genre now

fwiw The Witness is very intriguing and looks like it plays like what my dream version of Myst would be.

it's got the same vibe but the puzzles are quite different

never really played myst, though i watched others; i suspect that myst was atmosphere first, puzzles second; the witness is more the other way round - still has atmos and sense of discovery in spades though.

Was it someone here who recommended the crazy James Howell MGS2 Big Boss runthrough/commentary? It's pretty fascinating in a super dry way

I like his Last of Us videos!

His meaning James Howell.

I didn't know he did some, gotta check that out.

https://heterogenoustasks.wordpress.com/2018/05/02/caregiver-fantasy/

that was great

Every Mission is a Suicide Mission

https://longreads.com/2018/08/07/galaga/

The Bandai Namco documentation shared with me refers to Galaga’s original design as “simple, yet deep.” Its elegance lies in its ability to insist upon a high level of integrity in the gameplay. This is not a game that can be “point-pressed” by running up the score with needless actions. In Donkey Kong, by contrast, a player can mindlessly leap extra barrels for more points. Donkey Kong also boxes players in with a terminal “kill screen,” the interval where the game board simply doesn’t have the memory to continue play. The same is true of Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man. Scrambled code appears on the monitor and the game resets. Limited in such a way, the pursuit of a high score divorces itself from the game’s purpose: Dicking around with extra barrels has nothing to do with saving the princess. On Galaga’s hardest settings, however, the objective of the game and the achievement of a score are inextricably bound together. A high score is the product of existing well. At lunch a couple of days before ScoreWars, Mark tells me that’s the reason he loves the game: “It’s all on me.”

this is the comparative analysis i crave

ooooooo

great great article

Yes

https://www.shacknews.com/article/103473/beneath-a-starless-sky-pillars-of-eternity-and-the-infinity-engine-era-of-rpgs

brief twitter threads worth reading

every quarter, some of my students are familiar with the first video game easter egg. (warren robinett's name hidden in an extremely difficult-to-access room in 1980's Adventure for the atari vcs.) none of them know the connection it has to labor rights.

— ☽ anna anthropy ☾ (@adult_witch) October 22, 2018

http://videogamesdensetsu.tumblr.com/post/180100803290/designing-2d-graphics-in-the-japanese-industry

cool stuff

the insularity of jp devs' middleware extended pretty much all the way up until the past several years where they're now starting to adopt unreal engine en masse which is an interesting development

Great article, thanks for that

i can't recommend this series enough. very heavy on images.
Tracing the Influence: Stolen Images in Games

for example:

https://i.imgur.com/P3nF4yM.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/4Jrg5yk.jpg

great find!

https://gamehistory.org/simcity/
With soundtrack, sprites and 1991 prototype NES Sim City ROM!

that is really cool!

Yeah that was awesome!

this guy's obsession with fitting all the Mario universe games into a coherent timeline is entertaining

https://tay.kinja.com/tag/warped-pipes

Great stuff !

“Firstly, did the brothers actually even go on this journey together? Unlike its predecessor, The Lost Levels does not have a multiplayer mode and instead has players choose which character to play as at the start of the game. Also to the same point, the Princess specifically says “Our only hero” in the game’s conclusion. Is it possible that both brothers undertake this journey but separately and that only one succeeds in actually saving the Princess? Or are there even more timelines at work here then we realize? This will definitely be something to ponder moving forward.”

if he hasn't figured out the Four Marios theory then he's gonna run into problems

MUSHROOM KINGDOM HAS 4-CORNER SIMULTANEOUS 4-PIPE MARIO CUBE

Enjoyed this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlLPbLdHAJ0

i know there are no good podcasts but suspend disbelief for a second...

are there any ‘ good ‘ gaming podcasts

thats pretty broad, what in particular are you interested in?