Gaming in the Nineties
June 03 2010 — JA
The other week, Paul Callaghan spoke at the second Meanland event of storytelling and gaming, and the narrative thread that was necessary to both. Play, he argued, was about assuming an identity. Much like reading, it demands that we immerse ourselves in a fabricated, engineered world that, for a few hours at least, must be accepted as truth. The key differentiating element then, was choice – gaming allows us not only to become the protagonist, but also to influence the narrative bent (to a degree anyway).
He also mentioned the strange experience of playing a game you’d forgotten you’d played – a game that, once upon a time, you were all but addicted to. The sound effects, the slightly clunky graphics, the peels of upbeat, synthesised music etc. He recalled yearly trips to a caravan park with his family, where he would regularly visit the local gaming arcade:
For as long as I could survive, I got to play at being Luke Skywalker flying through space, shooting down Tie Fighters, destroying the Death Star. But, I grew up, I stopped going on those holidays, and that arcade game slipped into memory.
Until I went to the opening of the Game On Exhibition at ACMI, where they had a pristine cabinet just sitting there, bleeping out John William’s score, spilling green and red vector light out onto the floor, reminding me of the time I’d spent with it years ago.
This example, he said, was a clear example of how play, through identity and through choice, could deliver a powerful and lasting narrative experience. I was curious. I’d always felt a similar way about books, which in part is why I’m such a fan of YA. My copy of Melina Marchetta’s Looking for Alibrandi still bears all the hallmarks of year nine exams – crudely hatched phrases in the margins asterisks, highlighted passages, a bent white spine and even a few bored sketches to boot. Reading it is enough to transport me right back to the classroom, getting completely won over by Josie Alibrandi while my English teacher tried desperately to rally the class into giving a damn. What kind of nostalgia, or narrative, would a return to games have to in store? Now mind you we’re talking the most basic, extra-nerdy stuff here. I had a Gameboy in the early nineties and it only had one game: Tetris. Spurned on by Meanland, I logged onto Google, and this is what I found.
Jacob Lambert over at The Millions describes the feeling of playing after so many years better than I ever could:
Like Pac-Man or Punch-Out!!, its pacing and graphics are as effective today as they were in the Reagan years, as good as they need to be. When I pop in, say, Tennis or Ice Hockey, I’m depressingly aware of the gap between them and their modern successors—grunting apes to today’s Gattaca humanoids. But Tetris is different. As with chess, efforts to update it have seemed superfluous, faintly sacrilegious. It’s one of the few entertainments that arrived fully formed, little improvement necessary.
Floating through Tetris’ cranial hyperspace forces a natural introspection. Often, sort of insanely, I’ll dwell upon what my playing method can tell me about myself. My technique isn’t to plow through rows or shatter a score; I play Tetris for the tetris: the four-row clear that comes with the vertically-nestled “I” block. Self-denial is necessary for the maneuver, as all must be laid aside for the blessed piece’s arrival. Meanwhile, the pile mounts dangerously. When the block finally appears, this mild daring and asceticism are handsomely repaid: there’s a flash of light, a scream of sound, and the pile’s heavy fall.
So there it was, just as addictive and just as weightless in its perfect tension between intense concentration and thinking on autopilot. And yes there too was the music that I could recall so well, the pleasing crash-drop of the blocks as they disappeared into oblivion. Hooked, I then went in search of Mario Bros, which in turn led me to remember playing something called Keen Dreams on a friend’s computer.
This was probably the strangest discovery – I’d clean forgotten about it but I must have played and replayed the game so many times that I could remember exactly that level and exactly how to make that jump. Back then, I never really questioned why I was so willing to inhabit a pixelated avatar who for some reason was running around trying to avoid giant carrots/potatoes while also having the ability to turn them momentarily into flowers. Wikipedia happily gave up the narrative:
After refusing to eat his vegetables, Billy is sent to bed by his parents. He falls asleep, only to awaken in a strange vegetable kingdom led by the evil potato king Boobus Tuber, who has imprisoned other sleeping children there. In the dream world, Keen does not have his trademark raygun and pogo stick, but has to defend himself with “Flower Power” seeds that temporarily turn enemies into flowers.
Ah.
Perhaps though this is indicative of another aspect of gaming as well – the investment lies more in our fleeting control of the story rather than the setting itself. It is not so much about the world designed for us but how we manage to craft and experience it.
Alexey Pajitnov, the creator of Tetris, had this to say:
As games designers, we just set up the environment and some motivation. Emotion comes from you guys, and we can’t control that. As soon as I design drama for you, I take away your freedom in the game environment. Either we do action and we are in the game, or we do emotion and we are in the movies.
Comments
Oh my, Jess, out of ALL the Commander Keen games you could have played, you’ve only ever played Keen Dreams? That was the weird ‘in-between sequels’ sequel. If you really want the best that Keen can offer, check out Commander Keen 4: Goodbye Galaxy! Now that game takes me back :). And would you believe that Commander Keen and his flower power was developed by the same mob that would later go on to develop such gore-laden games as Wolfenstein 3D, and the Doom and Quake series (arguably two of the most influential series in gaming history)?
As you may have guessed, games have been a pretty substantial part of my life for a long time now. Some of my earliest memories are that of sitting around with my games on our old Amstrad. I remember being the first out of my siblings to complete Da Bells! an old platformer themed around ‘The Hunchback of Notre Dame’. Games have an ability to transport and to entertain, and the interactivity they provide is absolutely unique in any arts medium. And yes, Ebert, games are art. How can they not be? Take Tetris: a seemingly endless pursuit for completion of an arbitrary goal, pursued by each individual in their own style, while being peppered with pieces of the puzzle they didn’t account for. What better analogy for life?
I know for sure that if I hadn’t played as many video games as I did as a kid, and still do as an adult, I wouldn’t be half as imaginative as I am now. The worlds that I invented from the 8-bit approximations that bipped and booped on my teevee screen were just as fantastic and detailed as their counterparts from the many books I read. But that involvement, my grip on the controller, caused those worlds to transcend into something more. Something that I had a hand in creating. And I don’t think that can be underestimated.
Nowadays, of course, graphics are a lot better, and it is harder to become lost in your own imagination when everything is presented to you in near-photorealistic quality. But to make up for that, the mechanics for stories within games have been stepped up. With the advent of modern ‘free-roam’ games (i.e. GTA et al.) and games that offer multiple paths based on morality (Mass Effect, Morrowind, Fallout 3 etc.), playing a game has come to reflect on the player him/herself. Far beyond entertainment, these are games that can, if viewed correctly, be used to gain insight into your own ethical or moral code. But far beyond any pre-made choice that the game developers might input into the game’s software, is the player’s investment in their character (I am loathe to use the word ‘avatar’ now, even though it’s more appropriate here), and in the story that is unravelling. It’s the bits between, where the gamer fills in the gaps—assigns favourite players within their band of heroes, or invents a more fitting end for a character tragically blown to bits—that are the most important. It’s that emotion, as Pajitnov says, where players go beyond the construct that the game developers have presented.
And then of course there are the games that defy classification. I won’t go into the many, many indie games that are making names for themselves (check out the indie game awards if you’re interested), but one game that has recently caught my eye, and has great potential as a bridge between storytelling and gaming, is Jason Rohrer’s ‘Sleep Is Death (Geisterfahrer)’. SiD combines aspects of storytelling with game design, an almost D'n’D style play, and infinite possibilities of stories to tell. Essentially it is a one-on-one interactive storytelling engine, an absolutely intriguing concept to me. You can view a slideshow which will tell you all about the game and its potential here.
Anyway, thanks for the article Jess. I think I might go see if my Mum still has that old Amstrad kicking around her place. :)
Oh I know – I did warn you that my gaming experience was nerdier than nerdy. At the time we just tended to latch on to whatever game we could swap over floppy discs (yes, remember those?). Keen Dreams was the poor choice of the day.
Actually, my first gaming experience was on this really tiny old mac – just bright green pixels and a joystick for racing a car around the same track. I wonder what happened to that computer now…
Thanks for a great response phill – you’ve added lots to my basic overview. I’ll be doing another related follow-up to all of this on Sunday, so stay tuned.
Glad to have – even inadvertently – triggered this rediscovery :)
Gaming is in a really interesting state right now as technology ceases to be the limiting factor in what we can create – and at the same time people who have grown up playing games find themselves as adults wanting to express themselves in the medium they love. It’s an exciting time, with projects like Sleep is Death, The Path, Flower, Bioshock, or Shadow of the Colossus, showing us what the medium is capable of.
Great post – I went to the Meanland event and it took me back to the days playing Galaga on the machine at the Foster pub in South Gippsland during long summer holidays. Pubs in redneckville can be scary places. But games were always some kind of digital sanctuary for me when I was a kid.
The 90s rocked for videogames. I was hooked on Super Mario Bros on the Gameboy, Last Ninja 2 on the Commodore 64 and Double Dragon on PC – although the dream run I had with the C64 began in 1988 with classics like Summer Games, Henry’s House, Commando and International Karate. We were taught to use MACs at high school school but everyone hated them and wanted PCs because the games were just way better. I remember carting around boxes of 5 ¼ disks whose corners had to be cut in order to make the data recordable. I read voraciously at school but games were highly visceral experiences that made the crapiness of school life more bearable.
Stephen Poole has written an important book on videogames: ‘Trigger Happy: The Inner Life of Video Games’ (2000). I used this when writing about gaming for my PhD. What I remember from the book was the connections and differences with other art forms, and also an exploration of the idea of play in relation to gaming. It had a great critical perspective on the subject too.
The idea of choice fascinates me but I’m unsure how much choice is actually within games. As much as I love playing videogames, at the moment I’m trying to figure out what draws me to them. I’m looking forward to writing more about this topic actually. I keep coming back to the idea of a ‘digital playground’ but not sure where this is headed just yet.
What I do know at the moment is that decent gameplay really excites me. I don’t have a PS3. My box is about 4 years old and struggles with the new titles that come out. I’ve recently been hooked on Diablo (circa 1996). The graphics are pixelated and outdated – but geez it’s an incredible game. I’m also playing Supermetroid on my old SNES and have just started blowing away beasties in Duke Nukem 3D. The humour, eeriness and bizarre but cool design of these environments really interests me. But also the effectiveness of the interfaces, puzzle solving and general gameplay keeps on drawing me back to these games despite their old hat status. In fact, I’m starting to prefer the blocky pixels which I think is kind of weird. Photoreality doesn’t really do it for me at the moment.
Having said that I’m very much enjoying BioShock, which I learned about at Paul Callaghan’s fascinating presentation. The idea of choice is cool here, it reminds me of the ways our avatars become reflections of the player, like the creatures in the God style game Black and White. What I love the most about BioShock, and indeed Half Life 2, is the artistic style, and the cleverness of the gameplay. BioShock is a wonderful mix of horror, sci-fi and hints of the acidic literary. I love the narrative unfolding about a bunch of people determined to fashion their own hedonistic world at the edges of science, engineering and art and how it’s ended up a violent and bloody mental asylum. Crazy stuff. I’m getting awesome ideas for my writing and novel. Half Life and Half Life 2, while different in content, had a similar effect on me. It was like walking through a weird art installation punctuated by the sublime goriness of ‘Alien’ and the frantic paranoia of Orwell’s Big Brother.
Very much enjoying the posts on this blog, keep ‘em coming.
Glad you’re liking the blog, Ben. Again – it’s great to see such detailed comments on this post. Really like the idea of the ‘digital playground’ too. There is so much more to explore, especially considering how far gaming has come from the nineties to the net.
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