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.
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.
Labels: history, innovation
¶ 12:45 0 comments
2.11.06
Whence "Frog Blast the Vent Core"?
There are obviously many things which we do not understand, and may never be able to.
- Leela, Operations AI for the UESC Marathon
It's difficult for me to untangle the roots of my degeneracy. History's funny like that. But I'm pretty sure the first cause, the primal cause, is Bungie's Marathon series.
These groundbreaking games were released between Doom and the original Quake, and the only reason for their obscurity is probably Bungie's start as a Macintosh developer. While "first-person shooters" were still in their infancy, Marathon pioneered features like secondary fire modes (years before Unreal), objective-based missions, and objective-based multiplayer. Bungie led the industry with 22khz audio samples and active stereo panning; the game engine even stole a march on legendary id Software, introducing overlapping rooms at different heights and integrating game physics moddable for each individual level. At a time when most FPS narratives amounted to "fetch the red key", Marathon's engrossing sci-fi storyline inspired an entire fan community dedicated to its exegesis. And besides all that, the Marathon games are notable as the spiritual prequels to Halo: the UESC Marathon logo adorns the hull of Pillar of Autumn, and the Master Chief is a direct artistic descendant of the Marathon's Mjolnir Mark IV cyborg - or maybe even the same unlucky guy...
The original Marathon shipped on a clutch of 3.5" floppies and barely played on my dorm-room Mac LC III, but I squinted at the screen in 1/4-size, late into the night, so my non-hardware-accelerated rig could limp along with me. Marathon 2 upped the ante with tech improvements and new characters, and was also Bungie's first cross-platform game for both MacOS and Windows. The storyline (arguably) concluded with the nonlinear pomo stylings of Marathon Infinity, but that package's editing and scenario-creation toolset spawned dozens of ambitious fan-made mods for another half-decade.
If you're interested in what the real experts say, GameSpy inducted the series into its Hall of Fame in 2001 and The Escapist, looking back from 2005, offered a comprehensive look at Marathon's legacy.
Why am I typing all of this? Well, if you're curious about one of the best and most innovative of the early first-person shooters, you can experience it for yourself with enhanced textures and resolutions under modern OpenGL acceleration. Bungie open-sourced its engine and eventually released all three Marathon scenarios for free; the fan community took over and added hardware acceleration, mouselook, and online multiplayer. They even ported many of the best user mods to play under the new system.
Your mission:
1. Start at Marathon on Windows for Dummies. (Despite the site's threatening name, this checklist is just as useful for Mac and Linux users.)
2. Once you follow those instructions, but before playing, grab the high-res texture package at the bottom of this page. (If you locate the package elsewhere, confirm that it's the most recent version, v6.1. A lot of old files are clogging those massive, tangled intarweb tubes.)
3. If you play Marathon 2 or Marathon Infinity, you should also download this high-res landscape texture package. (This isn't useful for the original Marathon, which takes place entirely in space.)
Be prepared for 12-year-old graphics. Updated textures are crisp, but enemies and objects (barrels, biohazard crates, etc.) are 2D sprites and look pretty rough. Also be prepared for very limited mouselook; like Doom, the original Marathon engine was really only 2.5D and required keyboard aiming, so the current version offers full horizontal freedom but limited vertical mouselook. If you have the patience to deal with these limitations (which once counted as revolutionary advancements), you'll find dozens of hours in these games - and maybe some wicked online carnage to boot.
...But wait - what about "Frog Blast the Vent Core?"
Well, I suppose you could Google it?
There are obviously many things which we do not understand, and may never be able to.
- Leela, Operations AI for the UESC Marathon
It's difficult for me to untangle the roots of my degeneracy. History's funny like that. But I'm pretty sure the first cause, the primal cause, is Bungie's Marathon series.
These groundbreaking games were released between Doom and the original Quake, and the only reason for their obscurity is probably Bungie's start as a Macintosh developer. While "first-person shooters" were still in their infancy, Marathon pioneered features like secondary fire modes (years before Unreal), objective-based missions, and objective-based multiplayer. Bungie led the industry with 22khz audio samples and active stereo panning; the game engine even stole a march on legendary id Software, introducing overlapping rooms at different heights and integrating game physics moddable for each individual level. At a time when most FPS narratives amounted to "fetch the red key", Marathon's engrossing sci-fi storyline inspired an entire fan community dedicated to its exegesis. And besides all that, the Marathon games are notable as the spiritual prequels to Halo: the UESC Marathon logo adorns the hull of Pillar of Autumn, and the Master Chief is a direct artistic descendant of the Marathon's Mjolnir Mark IV cyborg - or maybe even the same unlucky guy...
The original Marathon shipped on a clutch of 3.5" floppies and barely played on my dorm-room Mac LC III, but I squinted at the screen in 1/4-size, late into the night, so my non-hardware-accelerated rig could limp along with me. Marathon 2 upped the ante with tech improvements and new characters, and was also Bungie's first cross-platform game for both MacOS and Windows. The storyline (arguably) concluded with the nonlinear pomo stylings of Marathon Infinity, but that package's editing and scenario-creation toolset spawned dozens of ambitious fan-made mods for another half-decade.
If you're interested in what the real experts say, GameSpy inducted the series into its Hall of Fame in 2001 and The Escapist, looking back from 2005, offered a comprehensive look at Marathon's legacy.
Why am I typing all of this? Well, if you're curious about one of the best and most innovative of the early first-person shooters, you can experience it for yourself with enhanced textures and resolutions under modern OpenGL acceleration. Bungie open-sourced its engine and eventually released all three Marathon scenarios for free; the fan community took over and added hardware acceleration, mouselook, and online multiplayer. They even ported many of the best user mods to play under the new system.
Your mission:
1. Start at Marathon on Windows for Dummies. (Despite the site's threatening name, this checklist is just as useful for Mac and Linux users.)
2. Once you follow those instructions, but before playing, grab the high-res texture package at the bottom of this page. (If you locate the package elsewhere, confirm that it's the most recent version, v6.1. A lot of old files are clogging those massive, tangled intarweb tubes.)
3. If you play Marathon 2 or Marathon Infinity, you should also download this high-res landscape texture package. (This isn't useful for the original Marathon, which takes place entirely in space.)
Be prepared for 12-year-old graphics. Updated textures are crisp, but enemies and objects (barrels, biohazard crates, etc.) are 2D sprites and look pretty rough. Also be prepared for very limited mouselook; like Doom, the original Marathon engine was really only 2.5D and required keyboard aiming, so the current version offers full horizontal freedom but limited vertical mouselook. If you have the patience to deal with these limitations (which once counted as revolutionary advancements), you'll find dozens of hours in these games - and maybe some wicked online carnage to boot.
...But wait - what about "Frog Blast the Vent Core?"
Well, I suppose you could Google it?
Labels: history
¶ 10:36 0 comments
