School Sucks

Prompted, I assume, by the closure of Electronic Gaming Monthly magazine earlier this year, a NeoGAF poster scanned the first EGM issues from 1989. They're a great read. I'm not linking it to make fun of it, or to point out the obvious disparity in the quality of criticism compared to the level expected (or not) today. These pages, 20 years old, are a kind of uncomplicated, unabashed and cynicism-free writing about games that really no longer exists.

It might not be very good, but I find its effusive wonder to be endearing in a bittersweetly nostalgic sort of way. By way of a repetitive metaphor, Editor Steve Harris suggests that the rival console manufacturers could be seen as engaging in a 'console war': "The lines have been drawn and the artillery is about to be revealed to the game playing public.... Both NEC and Sega are poised to enter a heated battle for control of the 16-bit system sweepstakes!" Even technical pieces on the Lynx, the P.C. Engine-2 and Nintendo's new "portable arcade", the 'GameBoy' are written with unbridled enthusiasm, including an exclamation point at the end of every sentence. At one point the editorial collapses into a cheer of "Games, games, games!"

EGM reveals a lot about the state of games journalism in 1989 by how it chose to promote itself. EGM, it declares, is "the magazine to turn to for the hottest new game tips, tricks and strategies!" Furthermore, its "Top Secret section is also loaded with power-ups, codes, and other tricks of the trade! You can always rely on Electronic Gaming to blast your scores to new heights and get more out of every game you own!" Pre-internet, the print media used to be exclusively privileged with that kind of inside information. The idea, insofar as it's apparent from these early issues, was that you read EGM not because you were interested in games critically but that you aspired to mastery.

Harris brags on his reviewing team, advancing their credentials not as writers but as hardcore gaming experts. The 1989 EGM reviewers are "four of the hottest players in the nation... who have what it takes to finish any game that comes along." EGM evidently hired quiz show contestants, another quirk of games journalism which (for the better) hasn't persisted. The move towards serious critique comes at the unintentional expense of the charm this early house style must have held for school kids who would read EGM and view it as a dream job. EGM positioned the responsibilities of a games reviewer as honing video game skills, with special access to awesome cheat codes, and then either dismissing or boosting games in a magazine. They didn't have to be writers, because the job was the ultimate and probably only reward for a life of playing video games obsessively to the detriment of school work. They could claim to their parents that indeed they could succeed with their specific skill set, and high scores would get them somewhere in life. Magazine writers were gaming experts, but they, and the magazine itself, would eventually be supplanted by anyone posting on a message board. I don't think that level of childhood idealisation is present anymore.

I don't remember what gaming was like in 1989, but I hope it was all like this anecdote from EGM issue #2: 300 Japanese kids skipped school to buy a Dragon Quest sequel the day it came out, and were arrested for "truency". I hope on the day that game was released that some burnouts in their parents' Cadillac passed by some nerd walking to school in the morning and told him that they were cutting class to get their hands on the newest Dragon Quest. They dare the kid to come along, and he hesitates, but then a girl with a mohawk and nose ring tells him not to be a pussy, so he agrees. 300 surly teenagers arrive at the mall and pound on the windows of an electronics store, screaming for Dragon Quest. Nervous staff freak out and call the police, who surge into the unruly mob, who yell about the pigs and fight back. The Dragon Quest riots spill out over escalators and through fountains; the perpetrators hurling trash cans through storefronts and the police neutralizing delinquent teens with pepper spray and batons.

That one kid gets pinned down on the ground with his face pressed hard against the cold tile floor. He feels a knee shoved up into the small of his back as his hands are cuffed. He hears the cop call him a stupid punk, who does he think he is? And the kid thinks: "Fuck you, man, I'm going to be a video game journalist."

There's A Monster In My Closet

"Don't leave, Dad," said the kid, all tucked up in bed.
"I'm frightened of things and they're not in my head."

"I know young boys like myself ought to be brave,
When facing black bears or a big tidal wave.
I admit it, I'm scared. To you, I posit:
I know there are monsters hiding in my closet!"

Dad sat on the bed,
With a smile on his face.
"You know, son," he said,
"I've been in your place.

"There's no shame in fearing those creatures Satanic,
But you're scared of an outdated mechanic.
Hiding monsters in closets? That's yesterday's news!
That trick doesn't work, it's been overabused.

"Sliding panels and invisible triggers,
Monsters spawn behind me, no shock, it figures.
It's too easy a fright, a cliché, no surprise.
Once I ran screaming, now I'll just roll my eyes.

"I'll tell 'em, 'No sir! You don't scare me too much,
No, not your red eyes, green horns, blue claws and such.
With greasy skin, you look like a teen at the mall,
Not a towering serpent, five hundred feet tall.'

"Don't let them get to you,
It's mind over matter:
You just say get lost,
Get outta here -- scatter!

"Don't give them respect, 'cause their scares are old hat,
And they can do better, so much better than that.
There's smarter ways to make your hair stand on end,
Your skin to crawl and your disbelief suspend.
Psychological terrors, sound and atmosphere,
Bloody visions of corpses that then disappear.
Static on the radio heralds your doom,
Not junior high bogeymen camped out in your room.

"Headcrabs and lurkers attaching to faces,
That's just the small stuff, now we're off to the races.
The doors slam shut and the lights are a-flicker,
Isn't your heart beating a little bit quicker?
Growling in the dark, make sure you have a gun,
But no flashlight, no map, you don't know where to run.
A chase through a hospital? The thought reviles.
Now do it in the fog while moving some tiles.

"Screaming monkeys are experiments gone wrong,
Creepy apparitions were dead all along.
Uncover dark secrets that fill you with dread,
the Shalebridge Cradle and the Pyramid Head.
Villagers in shantytowns worship Cthulhu,
Is that a cute little girl? No, she's fooled you!
Watch her dash like a spider over the ceiling,
She leaves mental scars from which you'll be reeling.

"Don't shine lights on witches,
You'll end up with stitches,
Don't get trapped in castles,
The staff there are assholes.
And don't go down tunnels
Without ammunition,
The mutants in there have
A viral affliction.

"There's so much to be scared of, don't settle for less.
Sophisticated techniques can cause real distress.
Look at your window, a hound could come through there!
Better block it at once with a bookcase or chair.

"But you'll do fine, 'cause you're a smart enough sort:
You'll conserve your resources and put in some thought.
If you're alone and you're scared, that's no way to be,
Remember I'm your father, you'll always have me."

The Sisters

[As of yesterday, I have a regular biweekly column on GameSetWatch. I don't know exactly how this is going to work yet, but for now what follows is a partial reprint of the first column. The full thing is available on GameSetWatch, but only on Hit Self-Destruct do you get access to the bonus behind-the-scenes liner notes on the column. This is a new and recurring feature -- short interviews with game industry professionals -- which has nothing to do with the column I wrote.

Duncan Fyfe: Right now, you're working as a programmer on the indie game Plain Sight at the six-person studio Beatnik Games, although I like to think that you are more famous for writing about the Austin GDC and video dames. What's your greatest regret about working in the games industry?

Alex Ashby: I think it's that I spent so much of my life believing that the success of my career hung solely on my ability to get a job with a big AAA company. From the age of 16 when I decided that I wanted to make games, I've had dreams of working with the huge company, being on the technical cutting edge, and making epic blockbusters that everyone would know about. There was no way that I could realise my grand visions single-handed, they would be only pale imitations of the kind of games I could make if I were at the helm of a huge lumbering giant of a studio.

So I made it my mission in life to climb the ladder, take the shitty jobs, moan about them and work up and up through the status quo, instead of actually doing anything. It was fun and I met a lot of super people, but at 25 that's nearly a decade of any creative potential I might have, wasted. Since then, every job I've taken has been with a smaller and smaller scale company, I've enjoyed the job more and more. I've slowly and stubbornly discovered that actually, I could have been doing this for years if I'd pulled my finger out. But I didn't.

Working for indie companies has changed my perspective so radically, that if I lost my job tomorrow, I honestly don't know if I'd take a job at a big dev studio again. If I couldn't find a small company or work for myself, I might just quit and do something else entirely.

Duncan Fyfe: You told me once that one of the first indie games you ever worked on was something called "Test Your Mettle", and that title was a pun because the character was a robot.

Alex Ashby: It wasn't called "Test Your Mettle"! It was just "Mettle", I added the "Test Your" for irony.]

The Sisters: an excerpt

The protagonist of Bethesda's Fallout 3 is a cipher, a window through which to view the gameworld, so if he had a LiveJournal he would not be writing about his feelings. He'd write about the post-nuclear Wasteland, about the slaves who rallied around the Lincoln Memorial, the android who wanted to live like a human, free elections in a one-man republic, the day the ghouls crashed the gated community.

He'd write about the young girl who fell in love with a priest, the father who took shelter with his injured son in a storm drain, the downfall of Vault 106 and the rangers trapped on the hotel roof. Fallout 3 is like any other RPG insofar as the player collects experience points, gear and currency, but it's essential to the experience that they collect stories, too.

Fallout 3 is easily cross-referenced and classifiable in the modern video gaming canon. The game grew up in an Elder Scrolls household where it aspired to be Fallout, it has all the trappings of a Western RPG and the unbroken camera of Half-Life, and gameplay buzzwords cling to it: non-linear, open world, emergent. Its least likely structural resemblance, though, as per the above paragraph, is to a book of short stories. Essentially, it's Dubliners with guns.

Holding forth on Irish municipal politics in a drunken stagger, this thought probably never even crossed James Joyce's mind. There was nothing to suggest the eventual similarity in the video games of Joyce's day (older games, they would have been in black and white). Dubliners and Fallout 3 compile isolated tales about unrelated people to establish the character of a city in decline: Dublin and a fictional future Washington, respectively.

They abstain from a central unifying plot (more on Fallout's exception later): Dubliners relies on its 13 vignettes, Fallout 3 on an array of sidequests, text and environmental tableaus for players who skip all the dialogue.

Joyce presents 13 drunks, writers, schoolboys and stage mothers whose collective epiphanies on themes of religion, nationalism and masculinity inform the artist's portrait of a city. The book is less a chronicle of individuals but of the social, religious and economic constitution of early 20th century Dublin. Fallout 3, obviously, is not nearly the literary equivalent of Dubliners: they are analogues in form, not in depth.

This is, in part, because Fallout 3 is collaboratively written and designed, and so lacks a prominent auteur as its figurehead. While critics can analyze Dubliners in the context of Joyce's personal history, Fallout 3 players don't know as much about the troubled Roman Catholic upbringing of Todd Howard or the trenchant alcoholism of Emil Pagliarulo, and so instead of subtle and deeply-encoded meaning we see plainness.

[Read the rest on GameSetWatch.]