Didn’t make it to GDC? Then you probably played Master and the Conquest of Humor. In the game, you play as Tim Schafer, looking for hidden jokes in his green room before he hosts the GDC. It is a proper homage from one master to the master catalog of Lucas Arts adventure games. From my earliest days of computer gaming, Monkey Island I, II, and Days of the Tentacle form my fondest computer gaming memories with my brother. Nostalgia appeared unavoidable.
If nostalgia deceives, then the maxim does not apply here—time did not diminish the eccentric characters, the interactive choices balanced by a perfect mix of sarcastic wit and self-deprecating quips, and amusingly tricky but never impossible puzzles. What mystifies me about my fundamentalist attitude towards this catalog is the fact that I played it, and loved it, despite not knowing any English. Playing the games again, I was surprised by the minimal impact the now non-existent language barrier had on my prior play-through experience. I had clearly gleaned the impulse of each joke, gesture, and puzzle, regardless of the language barrier.
It is easy to forget that more important than language, which provides its own nuances, puns, and pleasures, is the internal logic of the game’s interactive world. Specifically, how do you build a foundation where player inferences and their creative assumptions/speculations flow back into the intended interactive scheme and intended narrative parameter?
Sometimes, during the creative process, certain aspects are better left in broad strokes and abstraction, so that the audience may use its imagination to fill in the gaps. Did the 1959 audience for North by Northwest believe any less in the film’s reality because Cary Grant drove in a projected background? Did Rear Window’s 1954 audience believe any less in the suspense because the building looked like a set? No—each individual in the theatre used his or her imagination to superimpose a substitute image from a personal experience. The audience became a participant.
Admittedly, the abstractions were expressions of the medium’s technological limitations. Yet, as technological improvements make every vision, down to its atoms, a fixed reality, it is the players who lose their place in the process. Everything is designed to perpetuity until the experience simply washes over them without requiring any meaningful or imaginative thinking on their parts. In return, I find it very difficult to write anything about those games because they give so little besides adrenaline—it is not surprising that most “reviews” are identical spec-lists qualified by conclusory platitudes like, “If you liked X, then you’ll love X2.” On the other hand, blockbuster games have a valid place in the industry—adrenaline is a valid experience. I enjoy the big games tremendously and I admire the moxie, teamwork, and leadership it takes to thread a successful and satisfying blockbuster through the industry’s needle; and in fairness they strive for that same participatory spirit through alternate means such as community forums and competitive/cooperative multiplayer game play.
While there is a fine line between ambiguity and incompleteness, I’d like to see more games take a step back from the impulse to design every detail. Braid is the only recent game that, to my limited recollection, dwells intentionally on ambiguity as an integral part of its core. The game evokes a particular autobiographical feeling, especially the elliptic final text, to which players can project their own personal experiences of a break-up. Not only are players asked to participate by mechanically playing the game, but they are also asked to contribute by projecting a specific personal experience into an open-ended suggestion of feeling and gesture.
The Sims is another good example. It provides a generalized goal to create and manage a life; and within that broad parameter players can bring their own imagination to approach infinite possibilities. For every person who pursues a normal and stable life, there is a counterpart who traps and starves his avatar to death. The franchise’s enormous success owes much to the inclusion and accommodation of the players’ imagination and inventiveness.
I just want someone to provide an alternative to the perpetual arms race by developers to one up each other. The gaming community needs more experiences that are not completely thought out to an atomic level where I, as the player, am not a part of the creative formula. To paraphrase the poet John Ashberry, the act of reading is not complete until you find a reader. As long as we allow a disproportionate amount of games to do all the thinking and imagining for us, then gamers cannot hope to rise above their status as mere consumers.
