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Not exaclty a short story, but I wrote about some vidya before. It was a nice break from writing fiction. It's a little on the long side.
Several months ago, an acquaintance of mine introduced me to Rock, Paper, Shotgun – a site geared to PC gaming news. Earlier today, rather than attending class, I was trolling through their archives and I happened upon a most interesting read. Each of the writers had decided to ask themselves which games they had played that had instilled something permanent on their character; the games that have made them the person they are today. Those games that have forever defined their tastes, expectations and the ideas of what a good game is. It was quite an intriguing read, so I have taken it upon myself to embark on a similar retelling of my experiences.
Kerouac wrote On the Road on one long scroll of teletype paper. He said that it imposed an artificial structure on his stream of consciousness. An interesting thought to consider. I think similar logic is applicable to floppy disks. If I gave you a game on a floppy disk, you’d have many preconceptions you may not have come to had I given it to you on a CD instead. When I see a floppy disk my immediate thought is that first one that was a part of my life. It wasn’t in a box. I wouldn’t know box-art for many more years. It was just a plain blue floppy, neatly labelled Castle of the Winds: a Question of Vengeance.
This was the greatest thing I had ever seen. One of the movies I was brought up on, among others, was Conan the Barbarian. Scoff if you will, but I latched onto Conan straight away, and I still haven’t quite managed to let go. I couldn’t tell you why now. Probably because he chopped a lot of people’s heads off. In any case, the first time I loaded up Castle of the Winds, I completely ignored every aspect of the story, and made my own story. I wasn’t playing the muscle-bound faceless juggernaut that was presented. Instead, I’d decided I was playing Conan, so I ran around chopping everybody’s head off.
The game itself was more or less the same as any other roguelike, if not significantly simplified. There wasn’t much to it. There was a big dungeon, the levels were randomly generated, and you went through and killed everything. It wasn’t the sort of game that presented you with difficult choices and ambiguous moral situations. Nevertheless, I was playing a different game to everybody else. Nobody was playing Conan: the game, but at that tender age, I had my first role-playing experience. Both my Mother and my older Brother played the game as industriously as I, but neither of them made their own game of it. One of them asked me why I wasn’t wearing any armour, and I looked at them so terribly confused, as if the answer wasn’t already completely self-evident. Conan didn’t wear armour. What kind of a retarded question is that? I’ve never looked back. Back when I was playing WoW, I was a paladin for a little while, but I ran around with a one-handed sword with no shield equipped. Sure, it made me less effective in combat, and a lot less likely to get into a group, but whenever somebody questioned it I felt that same confusion I did about Conan. Shouldn’t it be obvious?
Every game I’d played so far had been all about the one character. When I saw my Mum playing Civilisations 2 it was like a whole new world. It wasn’t one little man on the screen jumping over pits, shooting Nazis or slaying kobolds, no. This was an entire empire. Cities and towns filled with throngs of people, all of it under her control. I loved to watch somebody else play this game almost as much as I enjoyed playing it myself. There was just a certain flavour to it, something clicked in my head when I saw those cities be born, and grow to staggering heights.
Almost inevitably, I was terrible at the game. I didn’t grasp most of the concepts. I had enough trouble coming to terms with exactly how many cities and people I was overseeing that I almost completely ignored the computer players. Then suddenly one of them sent a diplomat my way, and in an instant there was a whole new level to the game. Not only was there the construction and management of my cities, then the operation of my military forces, but now diplomacy had become a part of my little world. I had little to no idea how I ought to proceed, so I went ahead ignoring them. Eventually my pathetic little empire was crushed under foot by one of the big boys, and I experience my first cut scene.
For the life of me I can’t find it on youtube, so my paltry words will have to suffice. The camera loomed over one of my destroyed cities. Buildings were on fire, cars were in ruins along the streets, and the air was thick with smoke and death. Then, it zoomed into a section of wall and a pile of rubble in the middle of the road. Slowly, gently, it panned around to the other side where the shape of a man gradually emerged. It was a soldier, with his hand on his chest, and a pixelated mess of red around his hand. He looked at the screen, staring into my very soul, and then motioned at me with his other arm. He coughed and sputtered, then said “...this is your fault” before collapsing on himself. Game fucking over.
That was the point when I realised games had something special. That soldier had transformed before my eyes; from a blurry mass on screen into a real person, with real feelings and a real life. He was as much a person as my hero Conan was on screen, and what I had done within the game had resulted in his death. I had seen the consequences of my choices in the blink of an eye, and from then on the humanisation of characters in games has been a major factor in my enjoyment of them.
My Brother came home one day with a copy of Abe’s Oddysee. I can’t remember if he’d borrowed it or spent hard-earned dollars on it, but as I was the younger, invariably I was perched at his shoulder like a gargoyle, watching every move on screen. There were the predictable oohs and ahs, and the backseat driving, but it was a shared experience. Every time he accidentally rolled behind a barrel in the foreground and discovered a secret room, we both looked at each other completely gobsmacked. This tiny little room, ultimately of very little importance to the game itself, had become our room. It was the room we found, that other people didn’t know about.
It was thrilling to the very core. Not only had I discovered my affection for finding secrets in games, I had inadvertently shaped the voyeuristic tendencies that I still hold to this very day. I was a twelve year old who had subconsciously discovered Epicureanism. Even today, I’m more than content to sit on the couch as you, dear friend you are, play your latest game, and derive possibly more enjoyment from it than I would were I to play solo.
Pas example, a good friend bought Heavy Rain not so long ago. I’d read only trite reviews online; the extent of my knowledge of the game was that it was sort of like interactive fiction on the ps3. He invited another friend and me over to give it a burl. I know the game is constantly ridiculed for being overly dull, but that was one of the most enjoyable times I’ve had playing a game in recent years. We each claimed a character as our own, and traded the controller when appropriate. It was a real blast. We made jokes at the stupid tooth-brushing segment, we got confused at the futuristic FBI agent, and we were on the edge of our goddamn seats when the dad cut off his finger.
Morrowind is one of my fondest gaming memories. I spent so many hours in it doing the same things I could in countless other games. Wandering around, killing baddies and then levelling up. It wasn’t a new equation to me. It was, however, a new spin for me on an old friend. I think it was the juxtaposition of civilization with butt-fuck nowhere that stuck with me.
It started out pretty dark. You’re a faceless criminal, some stupid nobody. Pretty much everybody hates you. Or at least, almost nobody is friendly towards you. You’d scrape together enough to buy maybe one piece of armour maybe by killing crabs on the beach Rf stealing everything you could. Then you’d loiter around one of the bigger cities, exploring all the alleys and all the rooftops. Then, at the drop of the hat, you could walk out the gates, go over that mountain there, and you we gone.
The world was brutally difficult to navigate in, but that was okay, because getting lost was fun. You’d end up outside a volcano in the middle of a barren plateau, with no idea where you were. Your only weapons were completely broken, you had no health restoratives and there was a big fucking baddy around every corner. That feeling of dread that settled in was overwhelming. The only thing that matched it, really, was the unbelievable feeling of accomplishment when you got through it anyway. Maybe you lucked and scored a critical hit, maybe you managed to sneak past that one fucker in the way; whatever it was you did that feeling of anticipation when you finally saw the looming architecture of civilization behind a hill was unparalleled. I distinctly remember standing on the top of a mountain peak after being thoroughly lost for hours and looking down at Balmora city, and then thinking “goddamn I’m good.”
Criminally, as with most people, I was unaware of Beyond Good and Evil when it was released. I was still busy masticating Time Splitters 2. Little did I know what I had been missing. I had zero preconceptions about the game. I had no idea what it was supposed to be about, or even whether or not it was any good. From the second I hit go, I was almost hypnotized by this game. I think the intro sequence is my favourite from any game. The cut scenes were just so carefully linked with the gameplay. There was no interruption between the two, it just flowed on nicely. Not even ten minutes into the game, I had spotted something that would stay with me for the rest of my life.
My character wakes up next to a fireplace in a lighthouse. I know that my uncle is a pig, and that we own an orphanage that we set up for children orphaned by a war going on. I’m told this by a news reporter who was investigating the place. I’m told this information, but not in a jarring way. It felt natural. Then when I wandered up to a higher level in my lighthouse, I walked past the children’s bedroom. Intrigued as to what was contained within (possibly delicious secrets), I proceeded forward.
There was little about the room that was remarkable. Bunk beds. Big rug. Porthole windows. Then I looked at the walls. It was like poetry in a game; a thousand ideas and feelings condensed into a microscopic container. Every few inches, there were little drawings on the walls. Just tiny little scribbles. Pictures of me, the avuncular pig, flowers, the kids playing... this wasn’t high-resolution, mind-blowing next-gen graphics. It was just drawings on the wall.
There was something so resolutely honest about them. From that one miniscule detail, I got so much information. It just spoke volumes to me. I could’ve gone through the entire game and never looked at them, but there they were, staring me in the face. They said, unequivocally, children were here. It was unquestionable. One still image and I’ve learned more about this place, and become more intrigued to continue learning and exploring, than I have from any god-awful forced dialogue in Fallout 3, or bullshit cut scenes from Metal Gear Solid 2. Beyond Good and Evil hooked me into a beautiful world that it had created with such love and tender care with tiny, forgettable details, and I don’t think I’ll ever be as invested in what happens to the world around me in a game as I was then.
Last edited by Spoony on Thu Apr 15, 2010 9:26 am, edited 1 time in total.
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