frog blast the vent core
10.11.06
  Who creates worlds?


I recalled Origin Systems while reading Barrington Bayley this morning, over coffee and a breakfast burrito at the hippie joint down the street. A British "new wave" sci-fi author involved with New Worlds in the '60s and '70s, Bayley never became a household name in the U.S., but his work genuinely merits the description of "speculative fiction". I can't think of another author so adroit at creating new worlds within the space of a few sentences.

On to Origin. Starting in 1983, developer Origin Systems had a pithy but compelling motto: "We create worlds." In Origin's case, these words were an operating principle, guiding their development of groundbreaking games like Privateer, System Shock, and the Ultima series. Origin eventually took this philosophy into cyberspace, pioneering the MMORPG genre with Ultima Online (before finally, excrutiatingly fading into market history as detailed by The Escapist).

The question of "world creation" is complex, of course. Bayley doesn't craft wholly sui generis imaginative realms; rather, his writings work by starting with recognizable analogs - familiar social or literary contexts - and subverting or extending them in remarkable ways. Origin, likewise, didn't throw anything truly alien at us, but worked with convention through refinement and sometimes surprising extension. One approach to art in general, in fact, suggests that it works by confirming, satisfying, and subverting our expectations - which means it works with tradition, with a standard pool of cultural meaning on which we can draw to structure our experience of even startlingly-new worlds.

Put aside the philosophical muddle if you'd prefer. I realized, thinking through Bayley and Origin, that I had difficulty recalling the last PC game I played which created a "new world" - something jarringly, shockingly new. Sure, Half-Life 2 made an effort at world-creation (and in this sense at least surpasses the original Half-Life), but it hardly approaches the level of Bayley's achievements or even Origin's innovative work. I cobbled together an unsatisfying shortlist of PC titles - games like Arcanum, Fallout, The Longest Journey, Myst - but the most recent dates from 2001, and none subverts expectations in a particularly noteworthy manner. Console games like Katamari Damacy or SCEI's ICO and Shadow of the Colossus are more remarkable in this sense, but I'm thinking here of the personal computer, once the undisputed home of the deepest and most complex digital entertainment.

You might disagree with me on the evaluation of each of these titles, but that's not really my point (tho I'd love to read your comments, below). I'm more interesed in why - given the extraordinary potential of digital entertainment, the ability to unmoor ourselves from physical, social, even moral realities - we've seen so little that's truly new. Even more remarkable, we're seeing less and less newness as technology advances, the market expands, and electronic entertainment becomes a broadly-accepted cultural product.

Part of the problem is that "videogames" are generally viewed as mere entertainment. You can analyze specific mechanisms for this - short cultural life and immature market, soaring costs of production, risk-averse publishers, lack of independent distribution channels, etc. - but most of these challenges also affect books, movies, and especially comics (sorry, sequential art), and I think it's now broadly acknowledged that these media can sustain high art as well as market-pandering drivel. They've evolved mitigating strategies in response to market pressures, sure, but they're also accepted as at least potential art; they have an opportunity not often afforded electronic games.

The situation is further complicated by the game market's conflation of medium with message. Technology becomes its own context, so a game like Prey can stake claims to newness because of unique technology (variable gravity, portals) despite retreading the same tired old motivations, characters, situations, and structures of meaning.

This assumption that technology carries its own meaning isn't baseless. Myst was new partly because of its technology, and in a sense its innovative world narrative served the newness of the technology. Likewise, Thief introduced a striking new way for players to relate to imagined worlds, and its sound capabilities alone are enough to classify the game as daringly innovative. It's also not surprising that technological progress has become such a measure of meaning, since that same technology is one of the obvious reasons why electronic games aren't afforded the same stature as movies, books, and comics: the technology required to experience electronic games is still young, and it's tricky to dissociate the games themselves from their newfangled medium. But designers (and buyers) have perhaps forgotten that technology merely provides the means to create worlds - it cannot be those worlds.

These thoughts over morning coffee barely scratch the surface, and they might not even stand up very well to less caffeinated scrutiny. In the meantime, take a break from videogames, pick up Barrington Bayley's The Knights of the Limits, and relearn what it's like to be surprised.

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Re. digital life: game reviews; design esoterica; abstruse and cockeyed musings on the downfall of digital entertainment, the betrayal of its liberatory potential, and our collective passage into a twilight of undifferentiated mass-market muck.

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Currently playing: UT 2004 (PC), Indigo Prophecy (PC), Dragon Quest VIII (PS2), God of War (PS2), Resident Evil 4 (Wii)


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