camera obscura

A recent PPP poll says:

… 8% of North Carolina voters, including 13% of Republicans, think being gay should be a felony.

Fuck you, North Carolina

Colossal Cave--I mean, Myst Island... as if it mattered.

I’ve been revisiting adventure games. Their kind of make-believe doesn’t work for me any more. Never mind that this old software doesn’t seem to work so well in the world of wide screens and “HD” graphics. Myst V, which I bought from GoG (Good old Games) runs about as well as expected: in a virtual environment, pretty clunky. I haven’t experimented with lower graphics standards because, frankly, I’d rather have it look good and run clunky than look clunky and run smoothly. Some of the older games (Like Myst III) can’t handle high resolution screens worth a damn.

I perform this re-enactment ritual from time to time; it’s getting less and less satisfying. I remember not so many years ago being awed by these games, loving the immersive experience, especially Myst III and IV. [Never mind Uru; that was a failure out of the box.]  The memory of how much I loved them, how I lingered in those worlds, is as clear as it is puzzling. Is my need to be transported so much less now, or am I just losing my edge?

The stories themselves are… shall we say, not very engaging. The imagined worlds are good as far as they go, but they don’t go nearly far enough. There is way, way too much telling. Very little happens. They’re at their best when everything is completely mysterious. There never seems to be enough of it… and the whole “puzzle solving” thing interferes. I spend entirely too much time running up stairs and back down again; pointless activity: bring the floor up, take it down again, bring it up again, uncover the secret door, find the (completely useless and incoherent) diary, touch the magic book, run the endless busy gauntlet. It becomes exasperating much more quickly, now that I’m older. Over-designed to a fault. We haven’t budged from Colossal Cave; we’ve just upgraded our graphics. The intervening decades have taught the designers nothing about telling stories. It seems like the hoped-for synergy of artists, writers, and game designers never materialized. The story is nothing more than a thin framework for supporting intricate puzzles I could never solve on my own. It provides an excuse for them, but not a motivation for them.

I guess it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Alongcame the notion of “interactive fiction,” getting me thinking that the puzzle-solving nonsense I thought of as the price of admission would be supplanted by real stories. But the writers never came forward, did they? It’s because the writers knew something that the game-designers didn’t… and still don’t know.

Fiction is a matrix of possibility, not a bag. Everything is connected by cause and effect. You can’t make anything open ended without fatally weakening the story.  These games are collections of puzzles, and not “interactive fiction.” Choices have no consequences, not that matter anyway. You only choose in which order to solve the puzzles.

“Choose your own adventure” stories ultimately don’t work because stories don’t work like that. A story works, from the reader’s perspective, because it follows its own logic—it has to work that way. Characters behave the way they do out of their nature—it does matter what they do, and it’s important that they make their own decisions. It’s a kind of inversion of roles for the reader to take over the character’s decision functions, in the name of “interactivity.”

Ultimately, the reason adventure games did not fulfill the promise of early masterpieces like Myst is because they fail as fiction.

For all intents and purposes, in this time of Skyrim, of World of Warcraft, of Diabolo III, the adventure game is dead.

RIP, Colossal Cave. I knew thee well.

I’m 62 today. Here’s what I’ve come up with.

The photo is from the Vista infrared telescope. Info on the web about the telescope and the picture can be found here.